Longevity

Longevity

Chp. 1 Fifty-six Years Later (Sunday)

"You can hold that if it makes you feel better but don't even think about using it unless I tell you to shoot," Chris said very softly, nodding at the Stinger the rookie had drawn. He also crooked his finger and then pointed to a spot behind him, so that he would be positioned between the rookie and the door.

The young uniform moved slowly to the side with a puzzled expression, looking from Chris' face to the Attach'n'smash already sticking to the door lock. "But... a warrant..." he started to say, when Moore, his training officer, interrupted.

"Numbskull," he whispered furiously, "don't ask stupid questions. He's LLE. They haven't needed warrants for decades. In the hotlab raids, we follow his lead. And you're more likely to give one of the docs a heart attack from showing that shooter than you are ever going to have to use it on one."

Which was true. This should be an easy one. Chris had been shot at on a regular basis by all kinds of people who didn't like the job he was doing, or, he preferred to think, the job they mistakenly thought he was doing, but he had never been greeted by armed resistance from a doctor during a raid on a hotlab. The case was very different when he was dealing with guards in a ghetto hotlab staffed by kidnapped personnel. The rookie, Benton, should have realized that he wouldn't need to go in braced, since none of them had bothered to put on armor. On the other hand, the use of the Attach'n'smash was confusing, making it look like an aggressive raid when really it was just meant to be an especially swift entrance, to forestall destruction of key evidence.

Thirty years ago with the looming threat of a relapse into the chaos of the Allotment Riots, the politicians realized that LLE was overwhelmed by the scale of their mission and had voted in a lot of official prerogatives to make his job easier. A slew of unofficial ones had been added by tradition over the intervening years. Entering suspect hotlabs by smashing in the doors had been an LLE standard procedure ever since the Laws' power expanded.

This raid was
almost
no exception. The door crashed back on its hinges resoundingly as it reacted to the focused explosion, catching the man inside off guard. Instead of running, however, the man's first reaction after a split second recovery was to grab the collar on the growling dog standing at his side. As Chris and the two uniforms rapidly filed into the tiny apartment and spread out, the man not only stayed calm but knelt next to the dog in the center of the room and reassured him until he quieted down

"Dr. Clayton Andrews?" Chris asked. The man nodded unhappily.

"You know what this is about?" The man nodded again, and Chris went to work. The efficiency, like so many in the city a late 20
^th
century remnant, contained scant furniture, a bank of incubators and one of refrigeration units, filtration apparatus, and no luxuries. There was only the one man present. Chris made a rapid assessment: a minimally equipped hotlab, suitable for research but not functional as a clinic.

The next step was more tedious, but still necessary. He spent some minutes on a preliminary survey of the memopads and CU address files, trying to find clues as to who was paying Andrews and who worked with him. Experience had taught him to do this prelim in the hotlab before walking out with the suspect and his files. Once word of the arrest hit the street, co-conspirators and linked enterprises tended to melt away.

"What about my dog?" Andrews asked abruptly after Chris had been at it for a while. "What's going to happen to my dog?"

Chris stopped examining files and looked up to see four pairs of eyes focused on him. They were all staring at him as though he had all the answers, which he supposed in this situation he usually did. LLE was his playing field and he'd been at it a long time.

He stared back at Andrews, who was still crouching by the dog although he was no longer gripping the collar. Chris hated these neuro-enhancement cases, the ones brought to LLE's attention by anonymous tipsters. The tipsters were almost always jealous colleagues or bitter ex-subordinates, and no doubt some of them were equally guilty but even less scrupulous. Molebiol researchers with no current record of employment in a licensed facility would already have red flags by their names in LLE's files. Andrews had been flagged. Unfortunately, LLE lacked the personnel to follow up on that basis alone, or even on records showing purchases of standard molebiol equipment and supplies. LLE needed tipsters to show where to concentrate effort, but Chris despised them. The caller who gave up Andrews had said only that he was neuro-enhanced and running a hotlab, he hadn't said anything about how Andrews was profiting from the enhancement.

They were all still staring: Andrews, a tall, thin, nondescript man whose forlorn expression was devoid of the belligerence and bravado that most researchers adopted; the two uniforms; and uncannily - or perhaps more accurately, cannily - the dog. He was a beautiful shorthaired mutt, about 30 kilos of pure muscle, with copper-colored coat and eyes and a broad muzzle. The eyes were rimmed with black and were focused intently on Chris, although the dog was sitting in front of Andrews, its ears pricked and angled forward. As with his owner, there was no evident hostility. Chris had a revelation.

"He's neuro-enhanced too, isn't he?"

Andrews blanched and moved back to sit on a chair against the wall. The dog padded after him. "I understand, I do. You're just doing your job and I understand that. But please, it's not his fault. You know it just gives a little boost to cognition and memory even in people. He doesn't understand any of this. He's not a freak or a mutant. He's just a good, smart dog."

Feeling the dog's eyes following his every move, Chris went back to shuffling through the memotabs strewn about the room. Andrews hadn't even bothered to encrypt or secure anything, as far as Chris could see, but his brief preliminary survey showed nothing that could link the illegal enhancement to any confederates or another location. In that Andrews appeared to have been meticulous. In fact, as far as Chris could tell, the guy was a hermit. Chris' initial scant enthusiasm for the raid dwindled.

He raided similar hotlabs all over the city almost every week. All standard procedure. A routine case. Other than the dog.

What was unusual so far was the doctor's reaction. When undergoing an LLE raid, some became righteous, some furious, some pleaded. Also, all the evidence Chris had deciphered so far continued to suggest that Andrews hadn't used his increased brainpower on anything other than further molebiol research. The law was usually lenient in these cases. Andrews could be working towards anything from a brilliant discovery that would benefit the deprived masses, or one that would net him billions in the lucrative black markets. Chris left that to Molebiol Forensics to illuminate. When Forensics received the doctor's notes and Chris' report they'd send a team through to confiscate and sort through the lab supplies.

The penalties were minor compared to most criminal sentences, but catastrophic for a professional. According to the American Association of Medical Practitioners, as always responsive to a populist hot-button, neuro-enhancements and hotlabs with illegal clinical or research activities were ethics violations. According to the federal government, they were crimes of various magnitudes, with penalties somewhat dependent upon how profitable they'd been.

Chris took the other chair from the worn dinette and placed it a few feet in front of Andrews. As he sat down, he glanced at the uniforms, who backed off obligingly. "Dr. Andrews," he said. "You know what happens now, don't you?"

"Of course. I lose my license, and the enhancement gets reversed. And I spend a year in jail. I knew what I risked before I began."

"And if anyone can show that you profited financially from the neuro-enhancement you get fined proportionally and punitively. That's for the neuro-enhancement alone," Chris added. "Now, as far as the hotlab goes, we have other issues. If we find evidence that you did unlicensed resets or enhancements on people, or used controlled cultures and reagents, that would be much more serious."

Any researcher with the skills, supplies, and minimal equipment, and a scary minimum of understanding could perform illegal resets and enhancements for a pittance to try to support their research, hoping for some major discovery. The more enterprising researchers even found support from wealthy patrons. Investors, of a sort. Chris understood the unlicensed resets. People got desperate. But he'd never understand those who submitted and even paid for the unlicensed enhancements or volunteered for the research trials. None of them, he supposed, had ever seen or spoken to one of the pitiful victims of a badly fumbled black market molebiol procedure.

Andrews was shaking his head vigorously. "No, I would never... it was all just my own research. These cultures ... There's nothing dangerous. I swear."

"Do you have someone specific you want to go to for the reversal?" Chris asked.

"No. It doesn't matter," Andrews said. "What's going to happen to my dog? What'll you do with Louie?"

Back to the dog. Louie. For a criminal mastermind the doctor was a bit too sanguine about both the jail time and the enhancement reversal, but then perhaps Andrews had more confidence than Chris did in the ability of his fellow molebiologist practitioners to poke and prod his neural circuits safely back to their innate level - hopefully by cautiously reversing the process described in Andrew's notes. Good reason not to get too clever with encryption. In the reversed cases Chris had been able to follow-up on there was seldom any noticeable diminished capacity, but significant memory loss was common. Which brought them back to the dog.

"You don't have a family member or a friend or co-worker he can stay with?

A year is a long time in a dog's life; perhaps more so if the dog is especially intelligent," he added, not unkindly.

Andrews was shaking his head again and his jaw had taken on a stubborn cast, although his eyes portrayed nothing but anxiety.

"Look, I know LLE has a reputation for being heartless," Chris said, "but I'm not trying to get you to implicate someone else. We need to find a place to take the dog."

"My wife and son died two years ago in a car accident. There's no one else. You won't let him be destroyed? You can't. That's just not right. We can't have come to that yet. Louie's just a good, smart dog," Andrews said again.

The dog was standing there, looking Chris straight in the eye with that non-sentimental trust that seemed to be their unique gift. His tail was waving slowly as though caught in a breeze.

"Take him, please. He's smart about people and he obviously trusts you. Please. I don't care about the rest of what happens to me. I knew the consequences. Just take care of Louie. He's a good dog."

At the final mention of his name, Louie leaned forward and placed his head on his owner's knee, pushing Andrews one step closer to the precipice of a complete break-down. Suddenly, Chris had had enough of this case. A hermit, yes, but a benign, idealistic hermit who had probably been doing research on something geared to save mankind from itself and whose only concern now was for his dog. On an uncharacteristic impulse, and with a premonition that he was unsealing a whole can of heartache, Chris opened his mouth and let the words out.

"All right. I'll see to Louie. Don't worry about him."

After that, Andrews pulled himself together and stumbled around his tiny efficiency, eagerly bestowing Louie's bed and bowls and leash, and pulling a huge half-empty bag of kibble out of a closet.

"He gets two scoops twice a day. And one of the dental treats after each meal."

Which is how, when they finally all got down to the curb, while Chris stood there with his arms full of dog accessories and Louie on a leash bedside him, as the uniforms assisted Andrews and dumped an evidence pack full of memotabs with molebiol notes into their car, for the first time in Chris' almost 80 years as a cop the last words from the prisoner just before the door slid closed were a sincere "Thank you." Andrew's eyes met Chris' and then, lingeringly, Louie's. The car locked onto the glassene strip and silently merged into traffic.