58 STICKY WIDGETS

58

STICKY WIDGETS

In the downdraft from the chopper, debris cascades from the conifers. Dead needles, pine cones, what might have been intricately woven pieces of long-abandoned birds' nests fall on Vida—and then harder objects rap against her like wind-driven hail. For a moment, she thinks insects are swarming, wasps or flying beetles, and she swats them.

These aren't bugs, however, not living creatures, but inch-long capsules of some kind, as plump as fish-oil supplements, but with what appears to be a gray plastic or metal surface. They come to her not as a consequence of gravity, but as if with the intent of angry wasps or with the eager seeking of mosquitoes responding to the scent that announces a mammal with a feast of blood beneath its skin. Like nettles, they fix to her jacket and jeans. Although they lack the tiny hooks that make all catchweeds so difficult to pluck loose and though they are dry to the touch, they stick stubbornly to her clothes. She tries to brush them off, but they won't be shaken loose.

Whatever these widgets are, they must have been dispensed from the helicopter. When she pinches one between her fingers, it seems as solid as a bullet, but she feels a faint vibration. They're not inert. Compact technology of some kind. Possibly produced by one of Terrence Boschvark's companies. With what purpose, what function?

She is reminded of Reyes Nochelobo, who traveled from Miami to Kettleton to settle his brother's estate and who brought to her the brightly wrapped birthday gift that José hadn't lived to give her. Reyes is ten years older than José and is afflicted with atrial fibrillation. He is on three medications, including a blood thinner, in addition to which something called a "Medtronic cardiac loop recorder" has been surgically implanted in his chest, in the hollow between two ribs; this device monitors his heart 24/7 and transmits the data to Medtronic in Minneapolis, from which it is available to his cardiologist by computer or smartphone. As José described it and as Reyes confirmed, the loop recorder has a five-year battery, can essentially transmit a continuous EKG to Medtronic from anywhere in the country as well as from many locations beyond its borders—and is approximately the size of one of these techno nettles that are stuck to her gear and clothes.

Maybe these widgets are nothing more than tracking devices, which is bad enough, but she can't dismiss the possibility that some might have a different function. If so much data and telemetric capability can be packed into a cardiac loop recorder hardly bigger than a lozenge that soothes a sore throat, why couldn't an object of similar size contain the stuff of a low-velocity smart bullet? An explosive charge. Tiny detonator. Technology that needs no marksman but guides the round to a target by some weird biological magnetism.

No. The lethality of a bullet is a consequence of its velocity, penetrative force, and deformation within the target; it carries no explosives. These widgets aren't impacting her, just adhering to her. And they're too small to contain a deadly quantity of C-4 or the like.

Unless ... If half the forty or more widgets sticking to her are smart bullets and even if each is capable of inflicting only a minor wound, she could still be disabled by the number of hits she takes and might even bleed out.

Science fiction. As Vida struggles to twist and pry widgets from her jacket, she's scaring herself with science fiction. Yes, all right, but it's become a science-fiction world—surveillance satellites, lasers, hypersonic nukes, virtual reality, designer babies, smartphones that have rapidly evolved into supercomputers, artificial intelligence. Technological advances have accelerated so rapidly that scientists and engineers, in their all-too-human hubris and greed, give little thought to the dark potential of even the brightest and shiniest of the new powers they harness, new toys they create, and new social theories they advance. All progress is said to be purely good, although history is replete with evidence this is not true. Those, like Vida, who have held fast to their common sense are increasingly concerned—in the grip of an uneasiness bordering on dread—that the escalating power of technology has grown beyond humanity's ability to accurately assess its impact and control it, that we are the reckless agents of our annihilation.

As the racket of the helicopter fades, she tears off four of the widgets and drops them on a low rock formation that is as flat as a table and pounds them with a stone, but the fifth sticks to her right thumb as insistently as it had clung to her jacket. She is not a person who's easily given to fear; however, her frustration grows into angry consternation when she isn't able to shake off or strip away the damn thing. Search dogs are coming, as well as men with rifles, while she is still a mile away from the carcass of the crashed airplane in which she has stowed what she needs to survive the impending confrontation.

She unstraps her backpack and shrugs it off. Ten or twelve widgets cling to it. Four are fixed to her baseball cap, which she flings away among the trees. Her heart knocking, breath quick and shallow, she takes off her jacket and casts it aside.

The chopper isn't coming back. Evidently, they know she's been tagged. Like a cardiologist calling up a patient's Medtronic data, the killers on her trail know everything they need to know about her, although their intention is to take a life rather than sustain one.

Four of the devices are fixed to her jeans. She draws the knife from the sheath on her left hip. Shaves the razor-sharp edge along one leg. Reaps a thin fuzz of denim. She scales a widget from the fabric, but now the thing clings to the knife. She holds the blade to the table rock and pounds the stubborn burr with a stone until it dimples and falls away like a techno tick. Soon she's dealt with the remaining three, plus one fixed to her left hiking shoe.

The woods behind her slope down through layered shadows, with little evidence that morning was born earlier and is now mature. A flock of yellow-breasted western tanagers wings through a shaft of light, the soft whistles of their flight calls like the musical conversation of elves in this Gothic forest. Farther below, in another narrow intrusion of sunlight, a figure more menacing than birds looms into sight, a big man laboring upward, not near enough to be an immediate threat, but confident of where he will find what he seeks, and then behind him appears another.

Vida steps out of sight and stands with her back against the trunk of a tree. She slices the blade of her knife across the widget that's fastened to her hand. Although sharp enough to score stone, the cutting edge leaves no mark on the tracking device, suggesting that the thin capsule is made of an alloy stronger than steel.

Taking a deep breath and holding it, she presses the blade to her thumb and forces it under the widget, attempting to dislodge the thing as she had scaled others from her jeans. Whatever force binds the object to her is disrupted with a hot flash of pain. Taking with it two layers of skin, the capsule drops to the ground as her thumb darkens with a sheen of blood that forms into a trickle and drizzles toward her wrist.

Without realizing what she's doing, she sheathes the knife and takes several steps from the tree and finds herself kneeling before a low shrub with deep-green leaves. Although she knows the names of many plants, this one is strange to her. She isn't any version of a knowledgeable homeopath when it comes to the offerings in Nature's pharmacy, yet she plucks a leaf from its stem and folds it around her abraded thumb and applies pressure with her left hand as if she has no doubt as to what the effect will be. Her hair is an issue; there are widgets in it, but she doesn't dare delay to deal with them here, as the posse closes on her. She finds herself on her feet and moving fast uphill, south-southeast, neither on a beaten trail nor seeking one, confident that she can't become lost. The makeshift bandage doesn't peel away from the abrasion; instead, some substance in the leaf seems to combine with her blood to quell the pain and then to form a coagulating plaster that quickly stops the bleeding.

Her arcane knowledge, previously unrecognized, is only the consequence of her Becoming. Although she is no pagan, in some way she can't understand, the power of a myth that's thousands of years old is flowering in her. The ancient Greeks spoke of Artemis, the goddess of the moon and the hunt, protector of women and of Nature, while the early Romans called her Diana. No such goddess has ever existed, and yet the idea of such a figure has power that time and the passage of civilizations cannot erase, a power that has come down through the centuries to the motherless daughter of a police officer who was murdered when his child was only five. In this time of crisis, Nature and her imperiled creatures need a champion, and some mysterious entity has chosen Vida to resist the destroyers like Terrence Boschvark.

As she runs through the forest at a pace she has not achieved before, sprinting like a deer, never putting a foot wrong, with no weakness of muscle or bone, she is breathing no harder than if she were resting in a chair on her porch, and her heart is not laboring. She wonders if she might be losing her mind, but her new agility and stamina, along with her instinctive awareness of where she is in this wilderness and where she must go, seem to be evidence not of disorder but of stability, not of insanity but of a primal wisdom.

The men who are after her have such contempt for women that they expect to overtake her quickly, overpower her easily, destroy her with pleasure. Her intention has been to lead them deep into these mountains, along a circuitous route, frustrating and confusing them until physical weariness and nervous exhaustion make them less alert, as vulnerable as they will ever be. Recent events necessitate a change of plans. She needs to reach the crashed airplane that she furnished as an armory and take down her enemies sooner than later.

Vida breaks out of the trees and reaches the sun-splashed crest of the ridge. Bright blue flowers of Gentiana verna blanket the fertile earth between the shapes of bedded stone.

Having put some distance between herself and her pursuers, she can afford to pause long enough to deal with the few widgets tangled in her hair, but a better idea occurs to her. If she keeps moving fast, there is an advantage to being tracked. She races north along the ridge, across treacherous rock formations, with the alacrity of a surefooted mountain sheep. After a few hundred yards, she turns due east, plunging along a slope into a new neighborhood of less dense forest, through maidenhair ferns and snowy wood rush, having no concern about cougars or snakes, and certainly not about wolves.