[SF] The Hummingbird

Isaac's necktie was too tight, or it just felt that way since he wasn't used to wearing it. After six months of interviews, the ridiculous fabric around his neck had become associated with anxiety and disappointment. Now and for the foreseeable future, it meant something different, although it was unclear what that was.

He glanced over the top of his page-turner at the wall clock where his TV used to hang. He had gotten less for the television than he'd hoped. Still, what he'd gotten was better than nothing. It was a quarter to eight, giving him fifteen minutes before he had to leave, so he continued reading.

Hailey set her book down. "You don't have to go."

He closed his book and glanced at the unopened envelope from their mortgage servicer on the end table beside him. "Of course I do."

"We'll find another way."

She had that look in her eye again, the one that meant she was prepared to argue despite knowing she'd lose. She certainly didn't mean what she'd said, although what else was she going to say? They'd discussed it, and there were no other options.

"What will you do while I'm gone?" he asked.

Why had he even asked? It was not as if he'd remember over the following three days. It was normal to ask, and he was missing normalcy more than anything else. He hadn't even started the job, and he missed his mundane life.

She stood and filled her chipped mug with water from the tap. "I'll tell you when you get back."

He got up, straightened his tie, and put on his jacket. "I'm sorry."

"I know," she said, then drank her water. "We'll get through this."

He kissed her, then left.

He didn't look back as he walked down his driveway, where his car had once been. It had already gotten dark, and the November air was cold. His heart raced the entire ten-minute walk to the bus stop, which seemed to take half an hour. Each of the twenty times he checked it, his watch confirmed he was on schedule. If he missed this bus, there wouldn't be another. The line was thin on Sundays.

Fortunately, the bus was on time too. The short ride left him in front of a large building with a sign on it bearing the name of his new employer: Hummingbird Consulting.

 

Isaac had never signed so many papers in his life. That life was about to get forty-three percent shorter. The papers were mostly liability boilerplate. When he awoke from torpor, his brain would use different neural pathways, and nothing would cross. He'd sleep at the facility Wednesday as the torpor wore off and wake on Thursday feeling like it was Monday. His time as a Hummingbird would be permanently inaccessible. He'd never before signed a paper saying he was willingly giving up some of his memories. Maybe he wouldn't want to remember the things he would do, but somehow that made it worse.

"If my memories are separated between my time as a Hummingbird and my time at home, will I keep memories between clients?" he asked the HR representative, who seemed to be only vaguely listening.

"No, your memories will be chemically segmented," she said. "One session a day, one client per session. Before each session, your torpor serum will be modified to activate the segment corresponding to that session's client."

He finally worked through all the documents, and the woman led him through the building to a sterile room with bright lights and white walls. A man in a lab coat waited next to a torpor pod—a small chamber that lay flat, like a bed with a rounded, hinged cover that closed over it, making a tight cocoon.

Isaac took a step back and glanced at the double doors he had entered through. If he ran now, he'd have a chance. No one was there to stop him.

Suddenly, there wasn't enough air in the room. He gasped, pressing his hand to his chest. His heart was beating so fast it was on the verge of exploding.

The technician, blurry at the edges of Isaac's vision, approached and placed a hand on his back. "Don't worry. This is normal. Have a seat." His voice was too loud, and the room grew progressively brighter.

He guided Isaac to a chair beside the pod and offered him a bottle of water. As Isaac drank, the room slowly returned to normal brightness, and breathing became easier. He had never been claustrophobic, but this was something else entirely.

Isaac took a deep breath and turned to the technician. "Okay, I'm ready."

Was he ready? Probably not, but he never would be. He just had to get it over with.

The technician helped him into the pod and let him lie there for a few minutes while he set up the procedure. He attached several EKG leads to Isaac's chest and a pulse oximeter to his finger.

"Slight pinch," the man said. Then the line went in. Nothing at first, then cold. Like ice filling his veins, radiating through his body. After a moment, the sensation died down.

The man closed the pod with a click. The light filtering through the small window on the chamber hatch gradually dimmed. Isaac squeezed his eyes shut, and an image of Hailey filled his mind. Her honey-blonde hair. Her brown eyes. Her infectious smile. He was doing it for her. For them.

The chamber's temperature dropped, and a loud, rhythmic thudding sound filled his ears. His heartbeat. But as if it were coming from outside his body. It was slow, and getting slower. Why did it sound like that? Was this normal? How long would this—

No. Hailey. Her hands were around that chipped mug. She'd had that forever and would probably never get rid of it. Her eyes glistened at him as she took a sip of her tea. Her eyes. What color were they? Something dark, perhaps. Something...

But that smile. Her laugh. Did she laugh much? Hailey. He had to remember her. This was all for her. The warmth of her arms around him, a cocoon of its own.

She'd pull back and glance at him, then hug him tighter. His wife. Together forever. Her smile. That lovely smile. But who did it belong to? What was her name?

Could his heartbeat really be this slow? It was loud, but there seemed to be minutes between each one. How long was it, really?

That smile. It was on a face that slowly darkened. Everything darkened. Why was it—what was—what?

Nothing.

 

White.

Isaac blinked a few times. Everywhere, blinding white light.

His slow heartbeat quickened, pulsing in his ears. The taste of the air had a faint mineral quality, and the scent was something chemical that he couldn't quite place.

Where was he?

He blinked again, more rapidly now, matching his heartbeat until his pulse outpaced his eyelids. He was lying on his back with a glass window above him. A small window. Around it, darkness. Through the window, there was a single bright light overhead in a grid of ceiling tiles. At the far edge, a tile was lighter—whiter than those surrounding it. A replacement. Not too recent, as there was a faint discoloration. Maybe three months old.

The sound of footsteps echoed in a hallway, getting louder, bleeding through the closed double-acting doors. It was an adult male, one-eighty, moving fast. It must have been his handler, and he was excited.

He glanced down. It was too dark to see his feet, or the contrast with the light from the window was too great for his eyes to adjust to. The pod's cover wouldn't have let him sit up, so he didn't try. Besides, his handler was only thirty seconds away.

The IV was still in but wasn't dripping. His hands trembled as his body adjusted to the new chemical compound coursing through his veins. His heart was working overtime to get it everywhere it needed to go. It was beating even faster now than when he had—

When was it beating quickly? It had to have been just a few minutes ago. No, not a few minutes. He'd been asleep for sixteen hours. Still, after sixteen hours and a few minutes, he ought to remember.

Right. He wouldn't remember until the torpor wore off. He should know this by now, shouldn't he? After all, how long had he been doing this? Perhaps this was his first consultation. If it were, he should be more scared, although reduced fear was a logical pharmacological effect of the torpor. Or maybe he just—

The doors swung as his handler pushed them both open and entered the room from the middle of the corridor. He pushed harder on the right door, and it slammed into the doorstop. Perhaps he was right-handed, or was carrying something that kept him off balance; yet his gait was even. Not off balance, just right-handed.

The man came into view—short, balding, mustached, wearing crooked, thick-framed glasses, his blue eyes enlarged behind the thick convex lenses of the extremely hyperopic. His badge, bearing the name Franklin, swung as the man unlatched the enclosure with a click, and the hatch opened.

He held his hands up. "Stay there for just a moment while I unhook you."

After checking the readout on the screen beside the pod, he removed the IV line, then the EKG leads and the pulse oximeter. "All readings are normal."

Isaac sat up with Franklin's help. The room spun and everything blurred, but the dizziness only lasted a few seconds. His cold, numb skin tingled as his blood vessels expanded in response to the warm air, and then in a soothing, rapid shift, the sensation became a heavy, enveloping wave of heat.

Franklin handed him a clear pouch of orange liquid. "Drink this. It'll give you a kick-start. You'll need to stay hydrated."

Isaac took the drink and downed it. Thirst and hunger had been completely foreign to him for sixteen hours, and now they were all his body knew. It wasn't the same as not being hungry or thirsty during normal sleep. His metabolism and heart rate had dropped to five percent, pausing his kidney function. Now, everything ramped up to two hundred percent within a few seconds. His body remembered what it had been denied and what it needed to sustain that high metabolism.

"More," he said.

Franklin handed him another pouch. "Last one for now. You'll receive them hourly."

Isaac consumed this one just as fast, and his body woke up and was ready to run a marathon. His heart had already been in that mode for three minutes. Whatever the client was going to need, he was more than prepared.

 

At a conference table, Isaac sat in a charcoal suit, blue shirt, and a charcoal necktie, selected by the agency—quite sharp and appropriate for the situation. Across from him sat Jim and Sara, two executives representing the water treatment company HydroChem Labs, both wearing tailored suits.

Sara tapped her tablet, advancing the presentation on the wall to the next slide. "We've developed a nanomaterial water filter for municipal water systems. The filter removes forever chemicals and heavy metals."

Jim gestured at the map on the display. "Many cities can't afford clean tap water—the treatment systems are outdated in some places, allowing dangerous chemicals to pass through; other cities don't even have filtration. Our goal is to bring affordable clean water worldwide."

That wasn't achievable on a global scale, was it? Likely not on a national scale. Perhaps that's why they sought a Hummingbird.

"That's an admirable mission," Isaac said. "But for such a filter to truly be worldwide, it not only needs to be cheap but also needs to handle a vast range of contaminants that vary from city to city. How does it work?"

Sara advanced to a slide of filter schematics. "Our filter's active material is a zirconium metal-organic framework, a crystalline lattice whose pores are studded with functional groups that latch onto PFAS and heavy-metal ions."

So they had a useless loose powder identical to everyone else's that clumped and washed downstream.

"How are you structuring it?" Isaac asked.

Sara pointed to a specific part of the schematic, showing a graph of nodes separated by non-uniform distances. "Our scaffold polymer is the backbone that tethers the framework crystallites at fixed spacing so water can reach every crystal. That's our filtration IP—what makes us truly unique—the pitch between tether points, the stiffness, the orientation to the flow, all tuned and patented."

Isaac leaned in for a better view of the schematic. "How was the scaffold's geometry optimized?"

"That's unimportant," Sara said. "The issue is the binder that fuses everything into a porous block. It's a specialty crosslinked resin that's ruinously expensive. We can't use a generic binder with our polymer."

Unimportant. Strange word choice. He needed to know what mechanism he would work with, which made that information very important. Perhaps they were just protecting their patent.

Jim straightened in his seat. "That's the solve we need. We must maintain the active framework and scaffold exactly as drawn, but with a more cost-effective binder."

"Everything on this schematic is locked except the binder," Sara said. "That's your sandbox—go play."

 

The room was bright and documents were scattered across the table, a laptop in the center. Isaac typed notes into a document containing technical specifications while researching specific chemical binding mechanisms online.

He'd been working for about three hours and was close to a solution, but was due for his next nutrient slurry. Franklin entered the room with a pouch of orange liquid and passed it to him.

Isaac downed the tasteless drink. His nerves burned for a second, then he got an enormous boost of energy. He got back to work, and Franklin left.

The binder was a constrained optimization—cheap feedstock on one side, mechanical and flow requirements on the other. After another thirty minutes of work, the solution was a thermoplastic that fused the monolith at low temperature, held its porosity, and cost a fraction of the specialty resin.

Every simulation of his model proved it worked with the backbone and active material, but something was still off. The scaffold chain and geometry that the executives were so protective of were much more complex than they needed to be. On the surface, the binding worked fine, and there was no reason to dig deeper. He'd finished the project in less than half the allotted time. But what was the purpose of the complexity? He should dig into it to determine whether his solution would degrade.

He pulled up the schematics on his laptop and cross-referenced them with his own notes. The scaffold wasn't a continuous backbone; at precise points sat an engineered ester linkage, the weakest bond in the chain. Why would they have done that? Had they missed it when evaluating the design they were so proud of?

How long would it last, though? He tapped his pen on the table as he ran the kinetics forward in his head. In still water, it would last for years, but under municipal flow, it would hydrolyze as water slowly cleaved that bond. But under a first-order degradation model tuned to the expected temperature and throughput of a standard municipal grid, the bond would hold through roughly eighteen months of service, then the population of intact linkages would cross a threshold and the scaffold would fail all at once across the block.

They had to know; such a failure had to be deliberate. But what did they gain from their own product's deterioration?

The deterioration had to expose something. He scanned the schematics further. The scaffold was actually hollow. Sequestered in a microreservoir along the backbone was an enzyme, part of the proprietary stabilizer that was held inert as long as the chain remained intact. When the linkage was cleaved, the reservoir opened, and the enzyme flooded into the effluent, into the tap water of every home downstream of the filter.

He modeled the enzyme's activity to understand what effect it would have on the water. It would foul the taste of the water, so most people wouldn't drink it, and those who did would experience gastrointestinal distress.

He paced behind the table, muttering to himself. There had to be an endgame. Releasing a gut irritant into the water supply didn't help anyone. The executives he'd met with only a few hours ago weren't terrorists; he'd have known. But they also weren't genuine—not completely. But why then? What did they get out of it?

After a few minutes, he sat back down and researched the enzyme. He looked up its structure in an online database of scientific journals and found a match. Research on that exact enzyme identified it as a potential threat to the municipal water system. The study was linked to a home filtration cartridge that neutralized the specific molecule and nothing else. There was no other research anywhere on this enzyme, no studies showing any genuine threat. HydroChem Labs held the patent.

The filter Isaac was working on wasn't the fix; it was the delivery mechanism, timed to fail a year and a half after each city the lab contracted with tore out its old infrastructure and came to depend on it. They manufactured a disease to be the only seller of the cure. A trillion-dollar monopoly on drinkable tap water.

His job was to make the poison cheap and deployable globally. He was poisoning everyone. That was his role. To poison everyone. Something twisted deep in his gut, and he doubled over.

He couldn't do this. Maybe he could just delete the scaffold—no, he couldn't. He couldn't change anything. Deleting the scaffold, excising the reservoir, swapping the linkage—nothing could be done. The scaffold was the most heavily specified object in the design. QA would characterize every batch against it. Any change to that batch would read as altered pore geometry or flow performance; the batch would be rejected. They would hire the next Hummingbird to redo the binder, and he would probably lose his job. The only person who knew of the weapon's existence would have his memories rendered chemically inaccessible.

The enzyme had to survive. He had to build the poison and ship it. There was no alternative.

That's your sandbox—go play. The only thing he could change was the binder. But he still had to make it work. He couldn't just design a bad binder. They'd know, and someone else would fix his mistake.

The door swung open and Franklin entered again with another slurry. "Is everything going alright?"

Isaac smiled, placing his hands behind his head. "Great. Going to be early."

"That's excellent news," Franklin said. "The client will be pleased to hear it. They're a little antsy, if you ask me."

"Don't worry. I got this."

Isaac drank his orange liquid. Burning. Jolt of energy.

Franklin smiled. "Excellent."

He exited the room, leaving Isaac to his work.

Isaac began sketching all over his designs. He had to build the binder, but that didn't mean holding the block together was all it had to do. What if he designed his binder to release a message into the water supply?

The scaffold used bulk hydrolysis: a buried bond held for eighteen months, then failed at once. He would use the opposite regime: slow surface erosion of the block's wetted skin, allowing only a microscopic surface layer to dissolve at a constant, predictable rate.

How would the payload work? He needed something the city actually monitored in its water, otherwise it would go undetected. It also had to link back to HydroChem. The sensors running around the clock didn't identify molecules; they read gross parameters: turbidity, conductivity, and chlorine residual.

They also monitored fluorescence... that could work. The continuous fDOM monitoring watched the water's natural organic glow to catch contamination. Natural dissolved organic matter fluoresced in a broad, known, unremarkable band, leaving room for a hidden signal to appear on the scanner.

So, the binder skin would erode, the fluorophore would bleed into the distribution system, and the continuous fluorescence trace would develop a sharp, clean peak with no natural explanation. They wouldn't need to name the compound, just notice that something is wrong. Wrong enough to send to a lab for evaluation.

He needed a synthetic fluorophore: a biologically inert tracer, harmless to anyone who drank it, tuned to emit in a narrow spectral window where nothing in natural water ever appears. Something a lab could take apart with high-resolution mass spectrometry—an exact mass and a clean fragmentation pattern that a database match to a name. And the name had to be HydroChem's. A signal was useless without a return address.

His hands started to tremble as he searched the HydroChem's patent portfolio. Was it getting close to time for his next slurry? He had to keep working. He found his fluorophore in the specialty-chemicals division. Inert, sharp-peaked, and owned outright by HydroChem.

The scaffold's bomb would release the enzyme at roughly eighteen months. The binder's bleed would cross the fluorescence-anomaly threshold at roughly thirty days, seventeen months early. Plenty of time for an investigation while the real threat sat dormant and fully intact inside the filters. The tracer would give investigators a reason to tear down the filter and find the enzyme. Even if they didn't find the enzyme, a raid was all he needed. No eighteen-month bomb survived a federal forensic teardown.

He concluded his work just as Franklin's footsteps approached from the hallway. The binder was even cheaper than the requirements allowed. The scaffold was preserved exactly as ordered with the poison intact, and every deliverable would pass QA.

And he finished ahead of schedule.

 

Isaac sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal, half-listening to the TV Hailey was watching. The news. She always watched the morning news.

He'd had enough of that, but there was something about it she always liked. Maybe the excitement of the next big disaster. Maybe the big story about the bad guys getting caught. Maybe just knowing what was wrong in the world. It was all too depressing for him, though.

He finished his cereal, filled up a glass from the tap, and walked to the living room.

Hailey set her chipped mug on the table, nearly knocking the car keys off. She nodded toward the TV. "Check this out."

Another dramatic story of stupid people doing stupid things, no doubt. He sat down beside her and watched the news segment.

People in fancy suits were being marched out of an office building in handcuffs, HydroChem in large letters on the wall. RICO charges and domestic terrorism.

She glanced up at him. "Guess they were going to release something dangerous into the water supply, but got caught in time."

"How'd they get caught?"

"EPA and Homeland Security traced a chemical they detected back to these guys. They said it was harmless. The real bad stuff hadn't gotten out yet."

"Wow. What a crazy world."