The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) (7 page)

There was another fundraiser coming and
they were looking for volunteers. Also, there would be pictures taken next
week. She had to remember to dress Alex next Thursday. There was a note
regarding a new vaccination against some virus called ‘Rn186’. Apparently it
could cause some sort of genetic disorder that wouldn’t impact them until they
were teenagers, but the government had recommended protecting the children
against it now.
She called to Ryan, who was in the laundry room.
“Hey Ryan, you need to make sure you get Alex to school on time next
Wednesday.”
After a few minutes, Ryan made his way to the kitchen.

“What?”

“Ryan, you need to make sure you get Alex
to school on time next Wednesday,” she repeated.

“I always get him to school on time.
What’s so important about Wednesday?”

“Apparently they’re vaccinating the
kids again for something else.”
She couldn’t quite remember the name.
“The note is over there if you want to look at it.”

He picked up the note while she was
talking, and finished her thought, “Rn186.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Also, he has pictures
on Thursday, so you have to help me remember to get him dressed Thursday
morning. No videogame t-shirts,” said Jean.

Ryan remembered the last round of pictures at school. Alex had worn a Rusted
Stakes shirt, and he had been the one who missed it.
Jean was mad for a week.

“Okay, I’m on it.”

Monday morning arrived, and Ryan was
once again at his desk looking at very many lines of ‘X’s. He spent the whole
day identifying specific fields on which to try Jim’s comparison idea. Only
this time it would be with the fields he had hand picked.

He wanted to run comparisons within
each of twelve patient treatments where an error had been found by the hospital
staff. Each of these treatments was known to have an error, and each had
thousands of records to compare against. He was casting a wide net. He spent
all of Monday and most of Tuesday putting together a list of the field ID
numbers to take to Jim.

Tuesday afternoon arrived, and Ryan
returned to the programmers’ area again to see Jim and maybe David. Both were
there when he arrived, and looked like they were having a heated discussion
about something.

“Hey guys, do you have a minute?”

David said, “Ryan, true or false; the
Star Wars Death Star was the most powerful starship of all time?”

“No,” said Jim, “you know it was the
Enterprise from the old Star Trek series.”
Without hesitating Ryan said, “No, it was the Borg ship from Star Trek.”
The two disgruntled programmers sat back down.

Ryan went into Jim’s cubicle.
“Jim, I’ve sent you mail that has criteria for twelve search comparisons
exactly like the one you described to me last week. I was hoping you would run
the same test routine on them?”

“Sure, just let me see what you sent me
first.” Moving very quickly through his mail he said, “You know the Borg
actually lost the war. Ah, here it is, let’s see what you’ve got.”

After a moment Jim turned back to Ryan,
“Sure, I understand what you have here. I can do it. How many records should I
compare against?”
“All of them, or I mean as many as there are for each treatment,” he said,
paused and then added, “It’s the only way to be sure.”
“Ok, that was an Aliens reference wasn’t it?”

Ryan just laughed, “Listen Jim, this
part is really important. I spent the last two days picking these exact fields,
no substitutions, Ok?”

“Got it, Ryan, I’ll be extra careful.”

Ryan turned to leave, and then paused.

“Thanks Jim, how long do you think it will take?”

“I’ve got a few things burning in the
queue, and then I’ll need to script up the query again. I believe I can have
the results to you some time tomorrow afternoon?”

Very pleased, Ryan said thanks again
and headed back to his office.

This was a good search, and he was
looking forward to catching something.

After Ryan left, Jim looked at the
information he’d sent for the data comparison. It was a good test. He hoped he
would have something to show for it.

Jim said, “Hey Dave, do you have any
better ideas for trying to help Ryan?”
”No, not really,” he said, “It’s a difficult assignment. I don’t really think
he’s going to find any answers this way.”

“Yeah, I think I agree.”

“So you know of course that the Enterprise
could have wiped out a ton of Star Destroyers.” He didn’t really care, but he
loved getting David worked up.

David went into a huge speech about why it wasn’t true.

Without saying a word, Jim snuck out
while he was still talking. He wanted to hit the gym downstairs for a little
while. He had a date tonight and he always liked to feel ‘ripped’ before going
out. Crouching low, he made his way off the floor.

The next morning, Ryan remembered to
get Alex to school a little early. On the way to school, Alex complained about
his stomach bothering him. It was the kind of thing that happened from time to
time, and it usually amounted to nothing more than Alex trying to duck out of a
dinner he didn’t like. Ryan, now a little desensitized to stomach complaints,
pulled into the school, and looked him over.

“Ah, you’re fine. Have a great day, and
I’ll see you when I get home.”

Alex unfastened the seatbelt, and got
out of the car.

As he walked towards the front doors of
the school, Ryan yelled, “I love you!”
Alex turned and waved slightly but kept going.

Ryan looked past Alex, and through the
glass exterior of the school foyer he could see long lines of children. The
lines wrapped around the foyer and disappeared beyond his view. There were
several nurses set up on one side, vaccinating the kids with the usual arm
injections. It all looked very organized, and they seemed to be moving quickly.
‘Ah, the wonders of modern medicine,’ he thought as he drove away.

Later that morning, there was a light
knock on the door. Ryan looked up to see Ben James in the doorway.

 
“Morning Ryan, I thought I’d check on you, and see how things were
going.”

“Hi Ben, please come in,” Ryan stood up
while Ben came inside.

“So how are you? Are you getting
familiar with how we do things?” Ben said.

“You bet. I’ve become familiar with the
computer network, and I’ve taken my first stab at probing the information in my
project. In fact, I’m starting with a method suggested by one of your
programmers, and I’m hoping to get some good results this afternoon.”

Surprised and pleased, Ben said,
“That’s great Ryan. The people I have supporting you are actually quite good. A
couple of them are really too good to be here.”

“I do have a question about the
information I’m working with; much of the data is encrypted, and I can’t tell
what it is I’m looking at.”

“What do you mean, ‘encrypted’?”

“Come around here and I’ll show you.”
As Ben walked around Ryan’s desk, he pulled up one of the records he had been
looking at yesterday.

“You can see that most of the fields are masked with a lot of ‘X’ characters.”
Ben nodded and walked back around.

“Yes, that’s going to be a sticky issue
to be sure. The amount of data, and I’m assuming you’re referencing the
research side, is huge, even for just this Facility. Much of what is there is
unknown even to my department.”
Ben sat down in one of Ryan’s chairs.
”You see it has always been the philosophy of IntelliHealth, that Information
Services must protect and serve the research data with the highest possible
care, but we are not always allowed to know the content of that data. Our
department has been quite successful so far.”

“I understand,” said Ryan, “But it does
make this particular project a little harder. I should say though that one of
your programmers, Jim Safe, had a very clever idea on how to get around this
wrinkle. He suggested comparing data from a single field against many records.
So we aren’t interested in the exact entry, instead we want to know if any of
the entries look different from the rest. In other words, if all the entries
are apples, we compare 10,000 records looking for an orange. It’s the strategy
I’m trying right now.”

“Sure, excellent idea. Jim is one of
the ones I was talking about, he’s very,
very
sharp,” said Ben. He chuckled lightly, “He knows it too, but don’t let his ego
put you off, Jim’s a good man.”
“He seems to be genuinely interested in the project,” said Ryan.
”Excellent that sounds like a promising start.”

Ben got up to leave, but paused when he
got to the door.

“Ryan, would it help if I could make arrangements for you to visit with some of
the scientists and general researchers? Maybe they could shed some light on the
matter?”

Ryan thought it was a good idea. He
wasn’t sure what they could tell him, but it was certainly worth a try.
“Yes, please do Ben. I’d like to meet them and get their take on the problem.”

“Ok then, it’s a deal. I’ll make the
arrangements right away. Watch your mail for an invitation to go up and meet a
few. It sounds like you’re doing really well Ryan. I’ll talk to you again
soon.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

While he was thinking about it, he sat
back down and checked his mail. There was a response from Jim. He opened it and
saw the results of his 12 searches. There were 12 separate lines each with his
search criteria stated, followed by ‘Comparison of 10,000 instances yielded no
aberrations’.

Annoyed, he printed the results page,
and took it with him to Jim’s cubicle.

Holding up the page Ryan said, “Hey
Jim, I got your results. Really? Nothing at all showed up on any of them?”

Turning around from his monitor, Jim
said, “Morning Ryan. Yep, I doubled checked them. The code is good. The results
are solid. This was the exact same thing that happened to me when I tried this
too.”

Ryan stared at the page.

After a short pause he thanked Jim for
the help, and walked back to his office to think about it some more. He had
been sure that at least one of his searches would’ve hit.

‘Well that sucks.’
He wasn’t sure if he said that, or just thought it.

As he sat down in front of his
computer, he noticed that he’d received a phone call. Picking up the phone he
heard a message from his wife saying that Alex had thrown up at school this
morning. Apparently she had left work very early his morning to go get him and
take him home. Jean went on to ask if Alex had complained about his stomach on
the way to school.

“Well that sucks.”

This time he was sure he said it.

At the Dane house, Jean was up before
Ryan the next morning. Alex had some sort of stomach bug, and would be missing
school again today. When Ryan went to the breakfast table to get some coffee,
Alex looked pretty miserable.
He couldn’t help but feel terrible; if only he’d paid more attention to Alex
yesterday.

“Good morning, here’s some coffee for
you,” said Jean.

“Thanks, Jean. How’s Alex doing?”

“His stomach is much better, but now he
has a fever. It is going through his system pretty fast. I bet he will be
feeling better by this afternoon.”

Ryan looked at him again, “I sure hope
so.”
  

“He missed the shots at school
yesterday, and now we’re going to have to take Alex to the doctor next week to
get his inoculation. By the way, I got mine at work yesterday, and my arm
really hurts. Did you get one?”

He hadn’t even thought about getting
one.
“No, was I supposed to?”

Jean said, “Well they’re saying on the
news, that adults could be carriers, so they’re getting us too. I bet you see
them coming around at work today, or tomorrow.”