Impact! Read online

  Unless of course, you were the kind of curmudgeon who didn’t think that children should do anything that you didn’t do when you were young.

  Francine didn’t like his contacts because she had several times had the feeling that the kid wasn’t really paying attention to her. This left her wondering if he was watching cartoons on his HUD instead. But, she’d tried asking him some questions about what she’d just said and, without fail, he always knew the answer.

  Francine walked around behind him where he sat at the little circular table with four other kids. Like the other kids, he was drawing a stick figure family. His drawing showed a mother, father and child, presumably him. She studied the drawing thinking there was something odd about it. After a moment she realized that… it was simply very well done. It felt odd to say that a stick figure drawing had been done well, but it simply didn’t have the scribbles, overlapped corners, disproportionate bodies and off-center positions that were prevalent in the other kid’s drawings. Somehow, she had the feeling that he could have drawn a much better picture of his family if he wanted, but had instead fulfilled her request for stick figures.

  Francine uneasily wondered what it was about the kid that put her on edge. She just couldn’t put her finger on it. After contemplating it a minute longer, she sighed and continued on around the classroom, offering suggestions and compliments to the children about their drawings.

  Then it was playtime. The class trooped outside and soon were running, shouting, chasing balls, and otherwise having a grand time. Zage Kinrais, however, stood at one side of the playground, simply watching the other children. Francine went over to him, “Zage, don’t you want to play with the other kids?”

  The child gazed up at her with a serious expression, “Not really.”

  Francine blinked, “Why not?”

  “They aren’t doing anything I think is interesting.”

  Something about the way the child said what he’d said seemed much older than his years. “Don’t you want to make friends?”

  He turned to look out at the other children, “Um, yes, I’m supposed to. Is kicking the ball or playing tag an important part of making friends?”

  I’m supposed to?! After a moment to process that statement, Francine said, “Yes, playing with the others is one of the best ways there is to make friends. Why don’t you go chase the ball with the other boys?”

  “Okay,” the boy said, starting out onto the playground in the direction of the boys who were kicking a small soccer ball. They were playing some kind of “keep away” game. Francine couldn’t tell whether they had two teams that were trying to keep the ball away from each other or whether just a few of the boys who were friends were trying to keep the ball away from all the others. Sometimes she wondered whether she should put a stop to those kinds of games, but this one seemed not to be all that different from actual soccer to her.

  Next she worried that she shouldn’t have sent the chubby, nonathletic looking, Kinrais kid out there into a game of keep away. His feelings were probably about to get hurt…

  Jimmy Simpson kicked the ball to his friend Mark. It hadn’t seemed like the ball was going to be all that close to Zage Kinrais, but Zage took a couple of quick steps and stuck out his foot. The ball shot straight up into the air and came back down right beside Kinrais. He trapped it under his right foot. Mark, Jimmy, and Roger all converged on him, Jimmy yelling like he was angry.

  Francine started out onto the field, concerned that there was about to be a fight, but with a flick of his foot, Zage sent the ball to Billy Stevens. Billy was definitely not popular with the other kids, even though he hung around them while they were playing. Francine had the impression that Billy only ever got his foot on the ball by accident, but fortunately there were plenty of stray kicks with these relatively clumsy 3 to 4 year-old boys.

  Excitedly, Billy kicked the ball towards Marvin. Marvin also fell low on the pecking order so Francine’s spirits lifted at seeing him get a chance to handle the ball. Unfortunately, Marvin missed his own kick and the ball rolled on past him.

  Jimmy had been furiously chasing the ball and now he recaptured it, kicking it to Roger who fed it to Mark. Francine blew the whistle, signaling the end of the play period and the kids were soon trooping back into the classroom. She wondered once again, whether the free play periods were really such a good idea. With organized games she would have better control over the possibility of the popular kids shutting out the unpopular ones. On the other hand, “free play” sounded like such a great idea and the management of the preschool really believed in it.

  For a moment before she called the class to order, Francine thought about how coordinated Zage had looked when he stopped the ball. Probably an accidental fluke, she decided.

  Weird kid though…

  ***

  Shan watched his wife spooning cereal with sliced bananas and blueberries into her mouth. As he had on many other occasions, he mused over the disconcerting notion that the wealthiest person in the world made her own breakfast out of inexpensive ingredients. Before learning of Ell’s incredible wealth he’d always pictured rich people eating meals prepared by their personal chefs, living in exotic mansions and communicating only through personal secretaries. Well, Amy does kind of serve as a personal assistant and Ell does have people doing most of the grunt work for her out at D5R, but she does so much more for herself than I had ever pictured.

  “Hey Ell, I forgot to ask you about your golf game with President Stockton. How did that go?”

  She tilted her head, considering, “I think it went pretty well. She started off by telling me that she still believes that I should turn over the ET encounters and one-ended port tech to the government. She said she just wanted to clear the air, but I feared she was actually going to nag me about it for the entire eighteen holes.” Ell shrugged, “She didn’t though. We talked pleasantly about all kinds of topics including what new D5R technology was in the pipeline and what effects it might have. She wasn’t antagonistic at all!”

  “That’s amazing… not just that she wasn’t antagonistic, but that you were able to get along with her after she imprisoned you, then chased and persecuted you after you got away.”

  “Yeah, we’ve kind of agreed to disagree. I respect her for doing what she thought was right, even though I think it was wrong.”

  “How did you like golf? Should we go play some time?”

  Ell stared at him for a moment as if considering. “It’s a challenge. Getting the ball to go where you want it can be pretty difficult,” she said, not pointing out that her definition of “where you want it” would be significantly tighter than most other people’s.

  “All right! I think I could really get into a sport where being the world’s fastest human being doesn’t provide that much of an advantage.”

  Ell eyed him blandly, but said nothing.

  “So should I make a reservation?”

  She shrugged, “Sure.”

  ***

  Shan found Zage watching video from TC3. “Hey kid, you ready to head over to the University’s microbiology lab?”

  Sliding down off the couch, Zage said, “Sure. Have you ever watched the teecees Dad?” He spoke to his AI and the video paused, then shut down.

  “I saw one of the edited versions of Goldie and Silver’s trip up the mountain. I really liked that story, have you seen it?”

  “Uh-huh,” Zage said, sitting on the floor and pulling on his shoes. “That’s my favorite of their vids. I liked the show someone put together of their kids learning to fly too. I’ve tried just watching real-time video of what they’re doing right now, but that can be pretty boring.”

  He got up and they headed out the door to their car.

  Vanessa looked up at a knock on the door frame of the lab. A handsome, tousle headed blonde man in his early 30s stood there. She thought he looked pretty hot, then realized that he was holding the hand of a chubby little boy. This guy’s the mathematician with the precocious son wh
o likes microbiology?! “Hello?” she said, bending down and putting her hands on her knees to look little boy in the eyes. “Are you Zage?”

  The boy, a serious look on his face, nodded, “You work with Dr. Turner?”

  Vanessa smiled, “I sure do.” She looked up at the boy’s father, “What did you have in mind for this visit?”

  The man looked down at his son, “It’s pretty much whatever Zage wants to do, as long as it isn’t dangerous.” He tilted his head to indicate a question, “Dr. Turner said it would be okay for us to pay you for your time. Is forty dollars an hour okay? I know that’s more than you get per hour as a TA.”

  Vanessa’s eyebrows went up, “Sure! That’s more than I get at my part-time job on weekends too.”

  “Do I need to stay with you? Or could I just come back in an hour or so?”

  Vanessa thought to herself that it really seemed like he was just looking for an on campus babysitter, but if he could pay that kind of money and Turner gave her permission to babysit the kid in the lab, she certainly wasn’t going to complain. “Sure, no problem. You could just let me know when you want to pick him up… or I could just call you when we’re done?”

  Kinrais shrugged, “I’ll plan to come get him in two hours, unless you call me to say you’re done early or to tell me that two hours wasn’t long enough.”

  As Kinrais walked away, Vanessa leaned back down to the kid, “Okay,” she said brightly, “what would you like to do now?”

  The kid’s eyes narrowed a little as if he were regarding her suspiciously, then he said, “Can you show me around the lab first? I’ve never even seen a culture plate. I’d like to see your incubators, autoclaves, bioreactors, laminar flow cabinets, centrifuges, chromatographs, DNA sequencers, PCR equipment, microarray readers, and anything else you use frequently. Reading about this equipment hasn’t really given me any feel for what it’s actually like.”

  Vanessa’s eyes had widened during this recitation. Now her own eyes narrowed as she studied the child. Can he really be three years old? ‘Cause if he is, “precocious” doesn’t even begin to describe how freaky he is! After a second she smiled at him, stood up, and said, “Sure! Let’s start down on this end.”

  The kid climbed up on stools to peer into, over, and around each of the pieces of equipment. She offered him a culture plate and had him touch it with his fingers, telling him he could take it home and see the bacterial colonies that formed from his touch by the next day. The questions he asked, though, were almost scary. He knew the names of many of the common species of microorganisms found in the intestine and wanted to know what she thought would happen if the balance of the microbiota shifted one way or another.

  He seemed especially interested in Dr. Turner’s research on the effects of gut microflora on mouse obesity. The kid might only be three years old, but he knew what Turner’s papers said better than she did. “So what do you think? Does changing the microflora make people gain or lose weight? Or do you think that eating the kind of food that makes you fat changes the microflora?”

  Vanessa studied him while she considered her answer.

  Evidently the kid thought that she wasn’t just “thinking,” because he said, “Yeah, I’m fat. And I’m wondering if I’m fat because of the bacteria in my gut, not just because I eat too much. I don’t think that’s a crime.”

  Vanessa managed not to wince at how close the kid had come to some of the thoughts that had passed through her consciousness. Instead of admitting her guilt, she lied by saying, “Oh no, I wasn’t thinking about your weight. It’s just that you asked a very difficult question.” She shrugged, “It’s a really hard question to answer in people because they don’t follow diets very well. We know from mice that are raised germ free—so that they don’t have any microflora in their intestines—that if we then populate their gut with bacteria they rapidly gain a lot of weight. The general belief is that the organisms in your intestines help you harvest more energy from your food so that you can gain weight. We also know that if we put bacteria from obese mice into the guts of these germ-free mice that they don’t just gain weight up towards normal, they become obese. This suggests that the bacteria in the intestines do have a significant effect on obesity.”

  The kid frowned at her, “So what about in people?”

  “When we study people, we find that obese people have different microflora in their intestines than people of normal weight. But if we put obese people on a diet, assuming they follow it, their microflora changes from what it was when they ate whatever they wanted.” She shrugged, “So, it’s really hard to tell which is cause, and which is effect.”

  After a moment in which the boy seemed to be thinking, he said, “So if you wanted to find out what kind of bacteria were growing in someone’s intestines, you’d have to do a culture of their stool?”

  “Well, we don’t have to do a culture anymore. DNA microarrays will identify most of the microorganisms and give us a good idea of their prevalence. It’s actually much more accurate than a culture. But if we do a microarray on stool, we only find out what organisms are present at the lower end of the large intestine. That can be pretty different from the organisms in the small intestine. It’s much more difficult to get specimens from that part of the bowel.”

  “Really? Can’t you just have them swallow a port and suck specimens out every so often as it passes through the bowel?”

  Vanessa felt like her eyes wanted to cross. It seemed so obvious now that the kid had said it. She couldn’t believe that she and Dr. Turner hadn’t thought of using ports for that purpose. Probably, somebody, somewhere, was already doing such a study, but if no one was, a paper on it could be quite a coup. She smiled at the kid, figuring it wouldn’t do any harm to give him some praise. A three-year-old wasn’t going to come after them for stealing his idea, after all. “That’s a pretty good idea!” she said.

  “How expensive is it?”

  “How expensive is what?”

  “Doing a microarray.”

  “Oh, the microarrays themselves are pretty cheap nowadays. As long as you already have a reader for them, it only costs 1 to 2 dollars to run the test.”

  The kid kept peppering her with questions, one after another. Perceptive questions that made her think and made her contemplate things she hadn’t considered until now.

  By the time the kid’s dad came to pick him up Vanessa felt mentally exhausted.

  Chapter Three

  As Shan’s little pickup truck pulled out onto the highway, he looked over and saw that Ell was wiping the bronzers off of her face. Her strawberry blond wig was laying in her lap. Shan frowned, “You’re playing as Ell? I told Ryan that ‘Raquel’ was playing with us.”

  Ell shrugged, “So, when we get there tell him that Raquel couldn’t make it. Ell’s the one with the membership at the course. You can complain to Ryan that she invited herself along.”

  “But why? Why not just play as Raquel?”

  Ell looked at him a moment, then said, “Because I want to play well. It’s okay for Donsaii to play surprisingly well. It wouldn’t be okay for Raquel to do that.”

  Shan narrowed his eyes, “Are you going to kick my ass at golf too?”

  Ell shrugged, but said nothing.

  Musingly he said, “Golf’s really easy for you too?”

  Another little tiny shrug.

  “But I thought you were just really fast? Golf isn’t a game where quickness should help you!”

  She looked off into the distance, “Actually, it is pretty easy. After all, you’re hitting a ball that isn’t even moving.” She shrugged, “I think the reason most people have a hard time with it is that you’re swinging a long club, at a high speed, while trying to hit the ball exactly on a fairly small sweet spot, with the club face pointed exactly at your target. All those items added together make it pretty easy to actually hit the ball a little ways off the sweet spot, with the club face pointed a little bit the wrong direction. When that happens you wind up w
ith a pretty bad shot.” She paused to calculate, “If your club face is off by five degrees at the time it strikes the ball on a 200 yard shot, you’re gonna be off target by nine yards.” She glanced wryly at Shan for a second then said, “But having really fast reaction times make it pretty easy to line the club up precisely and hit the sweet spot… quite well.”

  Shan snorted, “Then, I suppose the ball goes pretty much where you want it to go, huh?”

  “Yeah. So to keep from freaking people out, I over club, under club, or aim it to one side or another, making bad shots on purpose.”

  Shan sighed.

  Ryan Keller looked around as he opened the trunk of his car and lifted out his bag. It was nice of Donsaii to let them play on her membership, this club looked really high end.

  He checked in at the clubhouse and went out to hit a bucket of balls. Finishing that up, he went over to the putting green. Suddenly he recognized Ell’s strawberry blond head bent over a putt. He hadn’t imagined that she might be there playing the same day that he, Shan and Raquel played. “Ell!” he said, walking up to her, “Are you playing today too?”

  She looked up and grinned at him, “Yep. With you. Raquel couldn’t make it so I’m filling in.”

  Ryan wasn’t quite sure how he felt about this turn of events. He’d been a little bit pissed that Shan was dragging his wife along on their golf outing in the first place. Of course, Donsaii was a girl too, but Ryan still had an infatuated crush on her. She acted friendly, but a little distant at work—as if she didn’t want him to think of her as possible girlfriend material. Besides, she lived with Bridget and he still dated Bridget occasionally. Oh well, she’ll be nice to look at, even if it’ll be a pain in the ass waiting for her to play off the girls’ tees.