Rowland Myers graduated from Northwestern University with a BA in chemical engineering near the top of his class. He’d been recruited by the world’s most aggressive chemical manufacturing companies including s0matic. What made s0matic’s offer more enticing was the fact that he had to sign an NDA to even know what the offer was and then found out he wouldn’t have to produce a better weed killer. Rowland would be working and with a team to bind DNA profiles to non-tissue devices. And that’s what Rowland’s job was at s0matic.
Though Rowland was an intelligent man, he was also a young man. And well to do young men do what well to do young men do – they party too hard on Thursday night. Rowland and his close friend decided to have a couple drinks and call it a night. The drinking ended when the bar closed and the night ended when his wake-up alarm went off in his pocket a mere 30 miles from his home. With the requisite number of expletives delivered on his way to pounding iced-coffee after iced-coffee, Rowland Myers made it to the office with minutes to spare.
Rowland’s heart was racing – maybe it was the coffee, maybe the cocaine fizzy he’d been keeping for a special occasion. But it was probably because he’d partied too hard the night before a scheduled delivery of 50 unit pairs. The final tests were conducted over night. All 100 ocular units were tested and packaged ready for Implant Centere’s arrival the next day. Rowland’s job today was simple, all he had to do was transfer the trays to the loading bins. The rule on product transfers was never to transfer by hand. And, if you had to break that rule for a legitimate reason, then it’s always two people per tray regardless of load size. The implants are not heavy, they’re just very fragile prior to implant. The evaporative gel that held the units together and in place prior to implantation was very susceptible to shock and exposure. Because Rowland was in a hurry to leave the night before – he failed to plug in the battery-powered transferring unit. He did remember hours later after his third sip of Fizzy Coca™ but it was too late to do anything about it then – and “Besides, we’ve never run out of battery before” he’d thought to himself. Rowland had never managed an order this large before. If he had, he would have realized that his 48-hour stand-by battery wouldn’t stand by through 50 pair transfers if he failed to plug it in to recharge at close of business the day before. So, Rowland did what anybody in his position would do: he blamed the technology and then began to work around it.
There were 39 transfers completed by the transferring unit before it beeped and shut down into power-save mode.
“Sonovabitch!”
Rowland was in the lab by himself, hungover from a night of debauchery not seen since his early college days. Not wanting to admit that he hadn’t plugged in necessary equipment, he chose to simply transfer the rest of the unit pairs by hand. His own hands – outside of the bare minimum requirements.
With nerves in flux, he manually carried the 40th pair from the placement rack to the loading bin. So far, so good.
The next three went as planned but he dropped number 45. It didn’t drop completely, but he did bobble it enough that the implants caught air momentarily. Heart pounding and pants probably a little wet, Rowland placed the pair on the lab’s testing table for a quick check. Everything seemed fine. All tests passed with green lights. It looks like he’d dodged a bullet. And that’s exactly how Treyvon survived the night in Qatar. Thanks to a clumsy handed Rowland Myers, Treyvon’s ocular implant malfunctioned the moment the strobe lights began flashing. He immediately lost his HUD but reacted expertly and decisively. While his unit members were scrambling in any direction away from the L-shaped ambush unable to see where shots were coming from, Tre targeted the strobes one-by-one in quick fashion. As ocular implants rebooted – soldiers began to join Tre in returning fire – expertly and decisively. They lost 21 soldiers in the battle but took out the Qatar militia with the remaining 39 expertly trained troops. Rowland Myers’s cocaine fizzy saved lives and allowed a well-exploited bug to be squished.
