He noticed my frown and nodded, "Yeah, doc. I checked it as soon as I got the squirts, thinking it must be some sort of food poisoning, but nothing was listed. Does that mean I am fine?"
I shook my head and gave him one of my standard quips when someone trusted their biomonitor too much, "Sir, you're clearly not fine. Cybernetics are only a tool, and tools can make mistakes, or..." I trailed off before finishing the statement and then blinked. I closed my mouth, quickly disconnected my personal link, remained silent for a moment and then said, "If you don't mind, I'm going to palpate you. That means I'm going to touch around your body. Please speak up if I get to a tender spot." He grinned but didn't make the obvious lewd joke, so I put him in the category of a gentleman, at least for the moment.
As I squeezed and prodded him, I asked, "So, why are you headed to the land of Maple syrup?"
He grinned, "I'm not! After the stop in Vancouver, ANA continues this flight to Anchorage. I'm headed to Alaska, one of the few places you can still hunt deadly wild animals in the wilderness... well, if you have enough eddies to buy one of the few slots every year, anyway."
"How interesting," I said in a tone that meant exactly the opposite. I tried not to judge a man for hunting, but I honestly would have felt like it was less of a sin to hunt humans in this world than some bears in Alaska. There was no shortage of really terrible humans; just find some that were trying to murder some people and hunt them down Running Man style. However, his statement did give me important information, namely that he intended to be in the wilderness in a couple of days.
I got through his entire body, but as I was squeezing his left calf, he let out a startled, "Ouch! That really hurt, Doctor." I hummed and lifted his trouser leg, noticing an incredibly inflamed area centred around what appeared to be a small wound on his calf.
"Do you remember something poking you in the leg today? A bug bite or anything?" I asked him mildly.
He shook his head and said, "No, not at all. Was I bitten by a venomous insect or something?" I smiled. He got a lot of credit from me for saying venomous and not poisonous, as most people did.
"No, you weren't bitten by an insect, but you were po-" my statement cut off instantly as my Zetatech system started three different kinds of alerts.
[Wireless connection established! Bearing 260 degrees, less than one metre.]
[Intrusion detected! Heightened security state engaged!]
[First level ICE, bypassed!]
About the same time I stopped talking in mid-sentence, the man sitting across the aisle from Mr Wilson suddenly went rigid as sparks started emitting from the back of his head. In slow motion, I immediately realised I was being stupid for trying to tell Mr Wilson he was being poisoned. I should have left with the flight attendant and told her in privacy, but I didn't expect the poisoner-cum-netrunner that hacked Mr Wilson's biomonitor to be on the plane. You'd think you'd use a slow-acting poison, like heavy metals if you weren't going to be around afterwards.
I was kneeling in the middle of the aisle, so there wasn't any real way to make this look like an accidental flailing of a startled woman, but I supposed I could try anyway. I yelled, "Virus attack! Kyaaaa~!" And with that, I punched the stunned and sizzling netrunner directly in the face. I was really glad that their attack seemed a bit on the weak side and had only penetrated my first level of defences, but at the same time, it would have made things much easier if he had just died right away.
Mr Wilson gaped at me open-mouthed, and one of the male flight attendants simply said, " Straighto !" My Japanese language chip identified this as an assimilated English word that had become a Japanese word over time. Namely, it meant a straight punch or a cross. A boxing term, which probably meant that I didn't fool anyone with my 'Kyaa!'
One of the first class passengers suddenly getting electrocuted, followed by me yelling about a virus attack and punching his lights out, got at least one of the hidden air marshals to jump to his feet, badge and gun out. Initially, I was treated as a suspect, as I had done the punching, but the air marshal quickly reviewed the in-flight video recorders and realised what was happening very rapidly.
Taking the handcuffs he had placed on me; he said, "I'm sorry, Dr Hasumi. Were you about to say that this passenger was poisoned? And do you mind forwarding me the logs for your ICE that detected the alleged attack by the man you struck?"
I rubbed my wrists and smiled, "Of course." I forwarded him the logs wirelessly while I said, "Yes, I believe so. Mr Wilson has definitely been poisoned; he's exhibiting all of the standard symptoms for massive and acute heavy metal poisoning." This got the flight attendant, who I was calling Thighs-chan internally, to say, "I'll have to tell the Captain! Is there anything else he should know?"
I hummed and then nodded, "Mr Wilson will need rapid nano-treatment at a level one trauma centre within the next four to six hours. So he should only divert to a large metro area. Otherwise, he should continue to Vancouver." This caused Thighs-chan to nod and sit down, obviously communicating with someone through an implant.
The Air Marshal pulled out a device and plugged it into the unconscious net runner's interface socket on his neck, and said to Thighs-chan, "Please have the Vancouver police meet us when we land, as well, ma'am." He glanced at Mr Wilson and went into detective mode, "You know any reason why someone'd want to poison you, sir?"
He growled, "Yes, I fucking do. But I'd rather not talk about it. Certainly not here. What I don't get is why I'm still alive..." he glanced at me.
I shrugged, "My guess is that they used some small capsule of a dissolved heavy metal, combined with a local anaesthetic and poked it into your calf muscle. I'm guessing that the capsule was designed to break down so that you got sick on your safari..."
Mr Wilson interrupted me, "A safari is only in Africa." I just glared at him until he said, "Sorry, continue..."
"So that you got sick on your hunting expedition away from any real assistance, and they hacked your biom at the same time so you wouldn't know how badly you were ill until it was too late. But something went wrong, and the capsule is cracked or something, letting in the poison a little too early," I said, feeling like Sherlock Holmes with my deductions. The air marshal made a non-committal humming noise, so I couldn't tell if he thought I was right, though.
He blinked, "Uhh... then can you get a scalpel and yank that thing out of me?" The air marshal glanced at me and nodded.
I shook my head, "Well, yes, I could. But I refuse to do so. The most likely heavy metal that is this toxic... there is a very good chance it is an isotope of polonium. And if so, if I yank it out, I might contaminate the entire cabin with a highly-toxic, highly-radiological aerosol, depending on how they packed the capsule."
Apparently, there were some things you shouldn't say on a plane. Amongst them, of course, was "bomb", but another few words that got a lot of people very excited was "highly-radiological aerosol." The air marshal, who was joined instantly by a second, demanded to speak to the Captain, and apparently, very rapidly, we were being diverted to a Royal Canadian Air Force base in Vancouver instead of Vancouver International Airport.
At least they would still have an ambulance waiting for Mr Wilson, but it looked like at least the first day of my vacation was shot.
I really hoped it was polonium and not, say, dissolved lead in a solution. My medical sense seemed to think it was polonium, but if it wasn't, I think I was in big trouble. At least, they let me put a tourniquet on Mr Wilson's leg to hopefully prevent blood flow, and therefore more polonium, from travelling from his calf, but he was going to need some serious nano-treatments to extract it all and repair all of the radicals damaging his DNA. On the plus side, the bears would be safe.
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Discourse
I got to sit in first class for the thirty minutes left of the flight, and I spent the time talking with Mr Wilson about random things, both as entertainment and also to subtly gauge how his illness process was progressing.
It turned out that Mr Wilson was what they'd call a "Texas Oil Man." Used to, that meant someone who drilled oil in Texas, but these days it meant someone who worked for a company that harvested the Biotechnica-licensed CHOOH2-producing wheat anywhere in the world and happened to be Texan.
He was a Senior Vice President and a minority shareholder in a small corporation that was in the process of being bought out by a Nigerian oil corporation. He didn't precisely say this, but he implied that maybe this was the proximate cause of his dilemma, as he was lobbying the other shareholders to refuse the buy-out bid, thinking they could get more. If that was the case, I tended to agree that the buy-out wasn't a good idea as his assassination had been needlessly complicated, with many moving parts that could and did go off the rails, and it was also needlessly cruel.
The continent of Africa was a patchwork of highly successful states buffered by anarchy or corporate-propped-up banana republics. Nigeria was one of the success stories, almost a super state on the same level as one of the European Community nations. Lagos was the Jewel of West/Central Africa, a truly modern city that any nation would be proud of. However, Niger and Chad, right next door to Nigeria, were practically stateless, filled with danger, anarchy and Corporations extracting resources from the land.
Even though the corporation he worked for was very small, Mr Wilson had to have been a bit richer than I thought. Perhaps he didn't like wasting money on air travel, or maybe he liked looking at ANA's flight attendants; who knew?
He talked a little bit about his business, and something he said stopped me cold for a moment. He said that despite how much revenue his corporation made, or even the giants like Petrochem and SovOil made, the real winner was always Biotechnica, who was the sole provider of the special, incredibly energy-dense and genetically engineered Triticum vulgaris variant of wheat, which was harvested and refined into biofuels that were marketed as CHOOH2.
"Why hasn't anyone tried to infringe on Biotechnica's IP? I can't believe it's out of the goodness of anyone's heart," I asked him, curious.
He grinned, in between dry-heaving, "I like your moxie, Doc. You'd upend the order of things. It's been tried a few times over the decades, but the response is the same-completely cut off from future years' seed supply, and maybe Biotechnica burns your crops to the ground, too or deploys some kind of bioweapon. The offending company goes out of business as there's no alternative, sadly."
Suddenly aware that everything I was saying was being recorded, I shrugged and nodded, "That makes sense." I shook my head with a chuckle, allowing some of Alt-Taylor's inner-Corpo memories to emerge, "Got to admire a good racket like that."
That caused Mr Wilson to almost aspirate some water he was drinking, coughing and then laughing, "Yeah, you're damned right." I had known that Biotechnica technology was behind the wheat that produced CHOOH2, but I didn't really realise how much they made from it. I assumed that there had been some alternatives or that other stronger corporations like Petrochem could have strong-armed them to pay a pittance.
That was good to know. I had already quietly released the full synthesis steps, including precursors, for Biotechnica's flagship neural stimulant, with the unknowing help of the Bakkars. One of the cities we had seen before Los Angeles, was Portland, in the Free States, and that gave me an opportunity to do so with very little chance of getting caught.
At this pit stop, Kiwi and I had hacked into a random business' net connection and left a device that, after a random delay, sent out messages to all of the criminal enterprises we could think of with the whole directions of how to make it. It might be weird, but the Tyger Claws were not unusual in their semi-legitimate facade. You could just e-mail the head of the Italian mob if you wanted or if you were stupid enough, although I definitely skipped them as I figured Biotechnica, being an Italian Corp, was deeply in bed with them in the first place.
I had already seen Network News 54 segments about Biotechnica cracking down on illegal pharmaceutical products in China and some Slavic nations, which got me to grin. It might not be related, but I thought it was.
Of course, my revenge had to be secret, or I would just get squashed like a bug. And I couldn't sustain the easy way of just reverse engineering all of Biotechnica's most profitable drugs, either. I could maybe do that a few times, but each time I did provide their investigators with a datum.
I felt it was inconceivable that they could have connected the first leak with either the Bakkars or me, as there were just too few data points to follow. We had already left the city when it happened, for example, and even if we hadn't, we still would have been only a handful of people in a city of three million.
But doing it repeatedly? That might get problematic. Moreover, they might start to think it wasn't just their bad luck, but perhaps they had pissed off a gifted chemist and then start to question themselves about which gifted chemists they had pissed off in recent memory. And that was the main reason I couldn't do this more than a couple of times.
But after doing a few more net searches after talking with Mr Wilson, I discovered that Biotechnica wasn't really a pharmaceutical company. They got over fifty-five per cent of their revenues from licensing fees and seed sales of their monopoly on the CHOOH2-producing wheat variant. How very interesting, and why hadn't I discovered that before now? They were really more of an agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology company that had a world-class pharmaceutical and life sciences division grafted on.
"We sell wheat," wasn't very sexy, though, so it was no wonder they put their other ventures forward as the main thrust of their company. If I had to guess, though, now that I knew what was happening, their world-class biotechnology and genetics were likely, primarily, to keep them having the expertise to keep them in the wheat business first and foremost.
After we landed, I noticed that we taxied into a deserted area, and even before Mr Wilson was taken off the plane, a group of heavily armed and armoured men rushed aboard, securing the subdued netrunner and dragging him off the aircraft. I was half expecting to be dragged off myself, but instead, Mr Wilson was carried off by a pair of paramedics with a mobile gurney.
