It Grows Underfoot... A Serendipity Oh story by M. K. Dreysen

Last week, dear reader, we introduced ourselves to Serendipity Oh. For this week's free story, let's dig into Serendipity's past a little. Find out a bit, perhaps, of how she left the friendly confines of Luna, and the academic world, for other horizons and different dreams. This week, let's find out just how

It Grows Underfoot... A Serendipity Oh story by M. K. Dreysen

The night Serendipity Oh finished the damned thing off, graduated, got the signatures on the first page before the bastards all walked out of the conference room, defended her thesis, did the fandango and danced the light electric... the night Serendipity Oh became Doctor Oh to you, ya schmuck...

Serendipity Oh lost her best friend. And she didn't even know it. Not until a month or so later. A month and a lifetime too late to do anything about it.

Jameil Ali was the golden child. The one for whom all paths are open, all routes available. Did he want to be a medical doctor, like his mom? Aid the sick, give comfort to the dying? He could have done that, if he wanted. Jameil had the memory, and the compassion, and a good understanding of the foundations of the discipline.

Did he want to run a company, like his dear old father? Dig into the financials and tease out the losses the managers hadn't found? Catch wind of a piece of equipment, something they were using in Australia in a different industry, but with a little imagination and a little work, hey man this thing just might save our butts... Yeah, Jameil had the curiosity, and the ethic. He could have done that, listened, learned, picked up the grab bag of skills and ideas and experiences.

Musician? Jameil played bass, and he played it well. He marched trumpet, because that's what he'd started out playing and he had a blast, but at home, on the weekends, when the urge hit him and the need for sound and joy came, the bass found its way to his hands. Both parents thought this was fantastic, Dad was a devoted worshipper of all things George Clinton; bass, well.

Dad Ali had dreams of his kid, up there on Luna putting down the line and grooving on six worlds' worth of live feed, bring the Solar System the funk, the life, the universe of love and spirit.

Mom loved Funkadelic, but what she dreamt of, laying there in bed after the last paper had been read, the last note to self for tomorrow's rounds put in the memory banks, was Yo-Yo Ma. She'd caught his last concert, she'd been six and her mom had taken her to the standing room only performance. Ma retired to an orbital life, free from gravity's poor sportsmanship and a century's worth of air flights and taxis, giving one last night to the budding space societies.

Mom heard the echoes of the cello, still. Haunting tones resonated down between the adults, pulled from the air by a white-haired, frail figure glimpsed past the hips of the crowd. And she dreamt of her son, a double bass in front of him, generating those ghosts for a new audience to be haunted by a century hence.

Whatever, however Jameil Ali wanted to create himself, these tools and more were available to him. He had the desire to go along with it. So he put in the work. Homework, practice, marching band and swim team, the hours of the day were full and long, but the kid had the smile and the power.

And the addiction. The one that crept into his head somewhere in eighth grade, about the time he noticed that the girls were starting to notice him right back. The cigarettes, they weren't the addiction, not all of it. The booze, the first few sips from someone bringing their dad's flask to school, that wasn't the whole of it, either.

The night his freshman year, Mom and Dad out of town and the cabinet sitting right there, Jameil sampling it, and then sampling way too much of it, yeah that was the beginning of the addiction. The beginning, but not the whole of it.

He knew better. So the booze and the cigarettes were easy. But his classmates, the other private school kids, all of them had the money.

And a few of them had connections. Grass was trivial, X, custom designed and created pills in designer neon, hey those were there, too, you just had to give the guy a little lead time, that's all. Up, down, sideways, whatever you wanted, it was all there, and the kids in plaid skirts or blue button-ups and slacks had money, they had power, they weren't going to jail for this shit now were they?

Jameil kept it together; he felt the tremors under his feet, the night he took a black mollie, the night he dropped acid, the line of cocaine. Each of those nights were magic.

But he backed away from them, freshman then sophomore then junior year. Put that urge back of the line, sir, there were other things that came first, thank you very much. Rice, or maybe USC. They'd come calling, and Jameil listened.

It got harder, fighting that addiction to the back of his mind. By the time Jameil graduated with his bachelor's, well, two of them because he'd done music and pre-med, by the time he put his blue and silver on and walked across that stage, ignoring the hoops and hollers and looking for Mom and Dad's tears and gentle smiles and Mom's hands up to the sides of her face like when he'd rolled down the driveway on his bike on his own the first time... by that time he'd traded cigarettes for a caffeine addiction, and hard Fridays and Saturdays for an occasional good scotch.

But he hadn't traded the addiction away. He believed he'd tamed it. Medical school was calling, and Jameil Ali was listening, and he'd built, he felt, ambition from that addiction. To help, to heal, to conquer death in little tiny ways, every day. That's what Jameil Ali told himself, each time the thing reared its head and nibbled at the back of his neck.

If the road to recovery begins with knowing you've shit the bed, the roads to hell begin with wide promenades, and entrances by the thousand.

At least one of them comes with music, a cheap drink, Serendipity Oh dropping in for a weekend visit for the first time in an absolutely ridiculously long time, and the beguiling young man weaving his way through the dancers. If you're Jameil Ali celebrating the beginning of your residency, that is.

The guy had ear buds in and glasses on, like the rest of the dancers he'd tuned into his own frequency, Kenneth, his own mood.

Jameil didn't know from love, but lust he could handle. Especially when the guy returned glances. Just so often, enough for Jameil to not quite give up and move on to someone else. He was tall, lithe and lean, maybe a swimmer, or a runner; maybe he'd had that natural born gift.

Basketball. As it turned out, the guy was a D-league guard, too short for the big league, too good of a handle for the team to let him go. "I get paid just enough to not go find something else to do," the guy told Jameil.

"And not enough to make any real money?" Jameil replied.

"That's why I'm turning on to something new." And he told Jameil about it, at the five in the morning pause before sweet sleep.

That something was the next step. From designer drugs, to designer bugs. Gut flora, the ever-present company. Jameil had hated those semesters of medical school, the ones that dealt with the things that live in all of us. For the simple reason that memorizing what felt like forty million different protozoa, bacteria, and others, good, bad, and occasionally indifferent fellow travelers of the human experience, was not his favorite way to spend his time.

Processes, yes. Mechanisms, of course. Surgery, administration, for God's sake put Jameil Ali to work doing anything in a hospital or doctor's office, from straightening the magazines to suturing gun shot wounds to handing out needles to addicts. Hell, Jameil would rather swamp out the restrooms than sit... and read lists... of the myriad... endless... bugs that people have found living in bowels.

If the guy hadn't been so very warm, and the bed so cozy... Jameil listened to his pitch. How his backers had re-engineered their gut bacteria for one simple purpose. "To give you whatever high you want, on schedule, and in just the right amounts."

Up, down, sideways, tune in or turn out, what you need is limited only by your imagination. "Take one, and what? Wait three days and get loaded?" Serendipity wasn't impressed, when Jameil filled her in.

They'd gone to dinner; Jameil had scheduled a followup date with Wayne Martene, the guy. Which might be a business date if this worked out, for Sunday brunch. Saturday evening, he and Serendipity sat in Lunatic's Pizza and Pasta, splitting a Chicago-style pie, her side the works, his side pepperoni only.

"They're engineered to produce the precursors only when you drink, or eat, certain things," Jameil supplied. "Drink a beer, and they load you up on THC, or LSD pick your poison. When the alcohol drops below a certain level, they turn off. A cup of tea, and you get opiates, or X, or psilocybin."

"And then you go safely on your way?"

Jameil shrugged. "Is anything safe? Sere, I just found out about this this morning. I'm not any farther along with it than you are." Except that Jameil had spent the morning logged on, chasing down every hint, every snippet of information. The rumors of self-engineering, biohackers, the world of self-experimentation.

Serendipity Oh had heard at least a few of these rumors herself. "Someone's getting out of their box. Go from self-experimentation to mass production in just a few easy steps. When do I start seeing the commercials?"

Jameil hid the frown that jumped to his face behind a bit of pizza. "I'm not married to the idea, Sere. I just want to know what it's all about, that's all."

And so it was Sere's turn to hide a frown. She used a beer instead of a pizza slice. And she didn't try and answer Jameil's reply. She'd known him too long not to spot the signs that Jameil had the bit in his mouth and he was going to tear this thing down to its parts.

Tear it down, feast on the pieces, and then build it up again as his own. Like when he'd jumped in the pool and made himself into, ok maybe not the state champion or anything but the best damned long-distance swimmer Saint Mary's school for wayward lunatics and groundhogs had ever seen. Or when he'd decided that he'd rather lose the first-chair bass at the Lunar high-school symphony through auditioning with Mingus' Sinner Lady than win with yet another rendition of Beethoven's recitative.

When he made up his mind, Serendipity Oh knew well that Jameil Ali would dig and work and kick until he'd reached his end point with this thing, no matter what anyone else thought of it. And no matter what anyone else might consider to be a useful endpoint. So Sere finished her beer, and her pizza. Then she gave her friend Jameil Ali a kiss, on his already balding head, and she left him to his new hobby. She had a class to teach, undergraduates desperate for nothing more than a passing grade in their very first instrumental lab, so it was back on the sublunar train and back across to the other pole. "Arrivederci, mi amor. Just don't do anything stupid."

Jameil gave her then the smile, his personal smile for friends and family alone. "Trust me, Sere. I've got a world awaitin'." Then he laughed, almost a roar. "Besides, if all I get out of this was last night with Wayne, then anything else is pure gravy."

Sere smiled and shook her head. "Work, sir, work."

He flipped her the finger. "Work's for Monday when I report for the first day of residency, and when you get up on front of a class full of clueless freshmen. Get thee gone, wicked woman, and leave me to my last few joys before the grind."

Serendipity Oh returned the rude gesture and left the pizza joint for a long train ride back to her world.

It wasn't the last time she saw him. But the next time she did see Jameil Ali, the only part of her oldest and dearest friend that she recognized as hers was, as best she could tell, the bald spot. Everything else, down to the private grin for the fortunate few, had been re-forged into something, someone, entirely new.

Jameil started with a survey of his fellow residents. Molly wanted "Adderall and THC, clarity and a good mellow feeling."

Adderall was almost universal. The other sides, the flip sides... Jameil put opioids into his list, even though he didn't want to, because there were so many who wanted it. "Blew out my knee snowboarding," Roger said.

"Too many nights on my feet," Jeanine told him. "Just enough for pain management, it would go a long way."

They all of them were as intrigued as he was. In their own problems, and little joys where they could get them, sure. But the second hook, among the doctors and the nurses, was the idea of what they could do for their patients. "Can you engineer Prozac? What about ketamine?"

Cancer drugs. Because the oncology unit could never quite get the cost down, not on the wrong side of too many patents and too many gravity fields.

When he started getting emails from residents in the Martian rotations, and even a little note from the chief of staff for the Io mission, Jameil knew he'd found something that just might matter.

Wayne didn't know whether Jameil had lost his mind, or not. Wayne braced his lover over breakfast. "What happened to easy, simple money? Get them high, three days later they're clean and maybe ready to try something new? And oh by the way, safe." Because the bugs had their failsafe, they did: die off and leave no traces, no permanent place for stragglers in the system.

The two men had moved in together just about six weeks after that first night. They'd put together a comfortable partnership over six months. Wayne with two cats and a ferret and weeks on the road, Jameil for the first time in his life dealing with things like litter boxes and impatient desk cats. He'd more than once called Wayne up to complain about Rotter the ferret stealing random surgical tools. Or Maynard Tuxedo sleeping on his computers. But these things were, Jameil was learning, just a way to make sure he had Wayne on the phone.

"They'll be just like the drug delivery flora," Jameil said. "Three day turnover, and then take another pill."

"Until the FDA catches up to you. They won't view the things you give a patient quite the same way as they do club-drugs."

Jameil didn't notice that he no longer gave Wayne, or anyone, his private smile. Wayne didn't notice, but then he'd only been around, at that point, a short time. Jameil beamed a sales grin, wide and easy and made to put his audience at ease. "But they're natural materials, aren't they? Macrovitamins, or yogurt, turned up and tuned up just a little. And we'll be curing people, Wayne. It'll be fantastic, once people understand how we're helping them."

Of course, it wasn't the FDA that made their life miserable, that first go-round. Nope, it was the drug companies. Because when you get down to it, the worst thing in the world, from their point of view, was an escaping subject.

Jameil met with the Pfizer reps on board the L5 station. "The chemicals have been out of patent for more than a hundred years. And they've never been successfully patented outside of Earth orbit. Just what in the solar system do you think makes me care about your opinions?"

He'd practiced the frown that went along with this statement. The sales grin came easy; he reserved that for the end of the conversation, the one that Jameil knew was predestined. But first...

"We'll have you tied up in courts for decades, Doctor Ali. You and anyone else involved in this. We don't have to win to make damned sure you never see a penny from these drug-release systems."

The suits were, to a woman, indistinguishable to Jameil. Power, all of them, tuned to their environment. Up and down orbit ten or fifteen times a year, out to the belts and back, maybe Luna, maybe Earth, didn't matter really. They went where the conglomerate sent them.

Jameil had three other meetings scheduled, with the other three major medical conglomerates. Practice, maybe.

Or maybe they were coordinating. That was easier these days, with no firm over-arching system-wide agreements to hinder the important people.

Jameil kept his frown in place, and hands laced behind his head, while he listened to his thought. 'What did they say?' this thought whispered to him. 'They gave something away, what was it?'

If it wasn't the chemicals, which were being manufactured on Luna, and Mars, right now, with no royalties or kickbacks... the suit had mentioned drug-release systems... 'Ah,' the thought whispered. 'That's what they've done. They're all working on long-release systems, time-controlled and easily digestible in the right combination.'

That long-standing goal, to get things past the gut and into the blood, and avoid the needles and the i.v.'s and the titrations in the clinic. Give a pill once a week and all your worries are gone. For a fee, of course.

And Jameil charged a lot less than they did. Why shouldn't he?

"I'll give you one percent," the newly minted CEO of Ali-Martene told them. "Four percent across the whole of your partners."

The suits attempted to separate and negotiate separately, but he squashed that any time it came up. "Look, you can pretend to the press that you're competitors, but we've all signed the NDA's, here. Let's put it together and be done with it. Four percent is a good round number, split it between you and get out of my hair. If you want more, you have to put up real money."

Which was entirely out of the question, the suits argued. They'd been sent to bite and fight, not do anything significant like spend real money. Nope.

They took the four percent. And Jameil gifted them with the smile. "You are all going to be heroes, you know why? Because you'll be able to sell your methods as 'real' and 'sophisticated', not the meatball methods those loonies and dirtpushers use."

And the suits walked out of the conference with their agreement, a little cash to come in the corporate accounts. And yes. A stack of pre-made advertising material to sell to the Earthbound billions, about how lucky they all were not to have to take so many medicines the way the "Poor microgravity and radiation-damaged explorers have to take, isn't it a shame?"

****

Rumor was, and Jae-lyn followed it. For something new, it's not like she had a hard time getting what she needed. A little here, a little there, a Saturday night that didn't involve sitting in her apartment listening to her roommate complain about her professors.

Lights and cameras and music. And if she was lucky, maybe a little space that didn't involve someone else creeping into it. "Why don't you just surf into the Libelous Lounge, if you don't want people touching you?" That's what Ys would ask, if Jae-lyn brought it up. So she didn't bring it up. She'd quit bringing things like that up a long time ago, because Ys was a wonderful little sister: a pain in the ass with a heart of gold and far too much interest in her roommate's love life. Or lack thereof.

Jae-lyn went out because it wasn't being in. And online was always inside. She'd never yet seen a room there that didn't blow her straight out of the mood, between buffering and time lags. Nope, she wanted the real thing. And she was happy to return to worrying about how many extra hours she could cadge in the library if she needed to, to cover the book and tuition money she was getting ready to spend.

She'd come for the pills already. But they'd gone the way of the dodo, and she had new adventures in her head. Story now was, there was a new type on the market. One-time purchase. Take it once, and all would be at your command.

And she'd not have to revisit it again next time she just wanted a blessed few hours in a nothing skirt and glitter-weight heels.

"Big money" it was, compared to what she was used to. But Dad had sent the semester check just yesterday, she'd enough saved over and the break coming up to work for the rest. She bought the new pill, sent it down in the Starlighter on warmup time, a little tonic and gin to chase it down with and wait for the mood to come to her.

****

Dawn in a college town, even with the advancements and the Luna gravity and there's only so much difference from Abelard and the gang. The ER wasn't packed, normally.

But the nurse and the AI on duty both recognized that three kids, three nights in a row, in for what the MRI identified as massive colorectal tumors... "How many twenty-year olds have you ever seen like this?" the nurse asked the computer.

"Once, twice a year at most," the computer replied, after dutifully checking its numbers. "Our statistics fit well across the solar system."

"What are the odds on three in a row, advanced to that degree?" Each of the kids had described three days of hell, stomach or back cramps, fever, abdominal bruising, the works. And then they'd found a way to the ER, their roommates dragging them in.

And then they'd died, because no one checks a young adult for colon cancer until it's far too late to do anything about it. The last one was bleeding out on her table and there was goddamned nothing the nurse could do about it.

"Somewhere around one in a million," the AI answered.

"And the odds that they're all in the same class?"

"Incalculable."

****

Serendipity Oh had lost students, because when you've taught for more than a minute, you've lost students. Random accidents, bad news from the family genetics.

Drugs and alcohol the most common cause, because they always had to test. And Sere had tested the boundaries herself, so there was only so much she felt she could shake her head over. "There but for the grace of God" and all that.

Three kids in the same class, within three days of each other? And all from the same thing, sudden rapid massive colorectal tumors?

Yeah, she didn't take it as an accident.

She tore down the lab first. Set the chemistry department's AI system going on any hints of random chemicals they'd missed. "Has there ever been anything in our storeroom history that would be likely to cause this? And I mean anything, including our research stores. Take it to the Dean if you need permissions higher than mine to get the answer."

Which the AI didn't need; Sere hadn't asked for direct personal information, the general question gave the AI the wiggle room to investigate and summarize. "As you'd expect, we have had research chemicals, most often in the biochemistry division, that could be expected to cause this, or at least similar symptoms. However, Professor Gollada retired some five years ago, and none of our current faculty have interest in such areas."

"How were Gollada's leftovers accounted for?"

"Offsite storage, her funding sources provided for long-term repositories in vacuo. Inventory and bonding listings are for the trans-Jupiter asteroid cluster labeled Ux101-Sipp."

Sere didn't like that. Rather: she didn't want to miss anything. "Is there a story there?" Meaning, she told herself, is there any particular reason Gollada would have chosen storage on the other side of the solar system?

"Costs. Bonding was ten times cheaper, and long term storage five times cheaper. New systems at rollout and complete automation, so no human interferences for the underwriters to worry about."

The lab testing was fairly easy, as well. It was a chemistry department, after all, so the AI had its own snooper bots to do the grunt work. As opposed to turning a bunch of underclass kids loose on day money and a prayer.

Sere didn't wait on the lab results. Oh, sure, there would be trace levels of something.

A mutagen that powerful, and three random kids from a junior-level instruments lab wouldn't have been the first ones to show it. Serendipity Oh prescribed powerful work to her kids, but she didn't put them into that kind of deep water. No mileage in it and there were a million times more of chemical spaces to work in than that branch. They'd get there soon enough, the hazmat suits and containments that lay in the future if they pushed farther. No need for that today.

Which left recreational chemistry, and tracking that down took her less time than it did for the AI to finish its analysis of the sampling.

They'd gone to ground, vamoosed, headed for the hills, the dealers had. If Sere knew within a week, the dealers heard it in hours. "You're killing your customers" has its way of sharpening the mind and the attention.

But they couldn't clean up their trails. All Sere had to do was ask the roommates. "Renata said she'd heard there was a new flavor in town," and "Jae-lyn told me she'd decided she was tired of spending good money just because she wanted a good night out every six weeks," and "Christy had never tried anything like that before. But when Renata mentioned it..."

The other thing the dealers couldn't hide was their connection. Club kids had many things in life, Sere believed, but they weren't normally focused on the kind of planning it took to engineer a drug delivery system. Not one that was intended to permanently hijack the bodily function the earlier generations had simply piggy-backed on.

Sere sat in her office, waiting on the AI's results before she did anything more.

But when she'd dotted her t's and crossed her i's, when she had the backup data she needed, Serendipity Oh turned herself to the task of getting into Ali-Martene's office spaces.

Unobserved, of course. Because she wasn't about to confront Jameil on hearsay. She wanted real data, if there was any.

They always air-gapped their important stuff, in Sere's experience. Still the only way to keep unwanted eyes away. If the computer was connected, it was compromised, that's the secret that everyone believed in.

Except that someone had to be able to shift information across the gap. And if anyone between the galaxy and the deep blue sea kept an army of data-entry clerks busy, Serendipity Oh had never heard of it.

She used her own machine to find the A-M repository. The Luna data sets were open, and blessedly well-maintained.

Jameil hadn't wandered far from home, Sere found. He'd taken over a datacenter from the old days, one of his father's. The older Ali's company sold off so the old man could safely retire, and the data center now rebuilt and repurposed.

And with a steady supply of data couriers on two-hour intervals. The traffic pattern stood out, the Luna government had noted it already; Sere found it with an email and a phone call.

A-M had not shifted certain kinds of operations yet. The courier services company was licensed and bonded across the solar system; Zhe Yuan had built herself a reputation. "We know you need data updated securely. We're the best at the job."

You could see them regularly, if you knew what to look for. Small fast rockets, small fast cars or flyers or boats.

Always discrete, though. Never a placard out of place. The only advertisement just a sign in the window, to let you know who'd been hired to do the job right. Always on time.

Sere had hired Yuan's Traders a couple of times, to deal with a recalcitrant co-author on L4 Station. Bloody bastard Barney refused to part with his data over electronic lines, he'd collected it and by-God he was going to be the first one to publish it. Twenty-thousand dollars per trip, L4 to Luna, and thank any god who bothered to listen that Sere'd only had to come up with the money once a year. Y-T's operation had asked only the what, the where, and the when, given her a quote. Waited for half as deposit, and half on acceptance when the kid in the zip suit, looking like he was barely old enough to shave, came in with the perfectly sealed and protected flat pack containing her data.

The traffic pattern suggested that the Y-T team had a retainer. Serendipity's contact had sent a link; average time for the courier was just less than ten minutes. Enough to get in, hand over for a signature, and then head back out the door. Electronic transfers were never that quick.

And Y-T never carried cash or equivalent. Data only, and it had to be no larger or heavier than a pack of three-by-five index cards.

Larger datasets meant more couriers, and more money. Simple as that. "How the fuck are you able to pay for a quarter-million in courier shipments a day, Jameil?"

What gave Serendipity Oh her hope was one more little aspect of those that paid Yuan Traders the best: you never knew who had the real data. The young man there at ten a.m., in his polo and slacks with the Y-T in carmine thread.

Or the granny in her shawl at three-forty-five in the morning on a random Thursday six weeks later. Neither of them knowing whether they had the real thing, or the dummy data that matched in every particular, date and time and size of file.

She might have taken a random-traveling salesman's solution path, or he might have been the fourteenth link in a chain of pass throughs; hell, Sere reminded herself, neither one of them might have held real data.

But they only showed up on average every two hours.

Not the same thing at all as showing up every two hours, guaranteed.

Sere went at five in the afternoon on a Friday. She'd taken the time to get a different haircut, she wore no makeup and she dressed like she would if a random big-money contributor showed up with deans in tow: a sport-coat she kept in her office, and the slacks and dress shirt she only put on when she'd heard rumors and gossip of the visitors and the begathon going down.

She carried her custom-made phone with her, and a handful of attachments that coupled to the extra ports. Nothing significant to random scanners, just a tool-kit in the pocket size, that's all.

Five o'clock on a random Friday at the A-M data center wasn't so different than it was at any other office space. Sere checked in through the first layer of office security, the generic one meant only to keep the lookie-loo's from wandering around the place.

The elevator, when she took the opportunity of an empty compartment, placed the leads from her remote across its ports, and asked the question, let her know that her presence hadn't been recorded as anything in particular.

Her handheld told her the elevator wasn't lying. So, instead of getting off at the first level, Sere got off at the level below.

The air gap meant she wouldn't be able to set a snooper. The odds that she'd pull this off twice weren't favorable enough to bet on. So, she had some few minutes to take a chance on, and then she'd have to haul buns for somewhere else.

The data transfer center would have been on the first level, the one the desk clerk, busy planning her night out, had directed Sere to. The second level, when she stepped out into it... was where the locals lived. The AI's present always, the humans who needed to talk to them came here for the remote stations scattered around the place.

And all of them with transfer ports, Sere noticed. She didn't stop for a sigh of relief. She went along the tastefully arranged temporary office desks, an open plan but not open enough so the guy at the next desk could see your monitor, until she'd reached about halfway from the elevator door.

She wasn't the only one working on a Friday evening. The lady in the back had her headphones on, the other lady at the front looked like she was getting ready to leave. Both of them dressed more or less the same way as Sere, business casual enough to handle a random boss cruising through, but nothing too annoying.

The port was standard, the operating system was standard, when she asked the node how much data was available to peruse, the number of bytes went somewhere north of "Way too damned big to even try and survey." Much less transfer in the twenty minutes Sere gave herself.

How do you hunt for a needle, not in a haystack, but in a thousand haystacks, in twenty minutes and with your bare hands?

Sere didn't. She sat down and started playing. Like she would with any computer. Go here, list the files, oh look they're interested in the Indian Threshold, hmm, and there's the Venus agency's call for proposals, a quote in-prep for the United Nations that would be turned down just like all the rest of them...

She didn't find a burning clue. She found a dumpster fire's worth of them. Not hidden at all, the notes were right there in the Research and Development directories. Under "Long-Term, Single-Dose Methods".

Sere didn't have time to worry that she'd been bird-dogged. Maybe she had, maybe she hadn't but her point wasn't to build a case, her point was to have enough information to get to Jameil in person with a fistful of outrage. She glommed the directory, which had a mountain of data, but all of it was there and transferred over, and she disconnected the port line while her handheld still had thirty-four seconds on the timer.

There and gone and waving at the new desk clerk, the other one must have headed out just as soon as her replacement had arrived.

"All finished up?" the kid said.

Sere nodded and waved. "You bet. Have a good weekend." She waited, just a beat, long enough to hear the kid whisper "At least it's a quiet weekend," and then Serendipity Oh hit the road.

The data wasn't enough to say anything about motives and reasons and what might have snuck out when the scientists doing the research weren't looking. This was bog standard stuff. Response curves, correlation functions, study reports and chemistry lessons and a very detailed look at a day in the life of a working research lab.

And when the bad news came, the reports all made note of it. "No long-term benefit" was the nice response. "Serious safety concerns" was the scientese speak-all for "Holy shit throw this combination in the dumpster and let us never speak of it again." All quite open and responsible and well-documented.

There was nothing to hide here, and if Sere was reading it right, they'd all stopped where they should, where the AI and the PI took a look at the dead mice and said "Nope."

"So who's the one who decided that the scientists weren't giving you the answer you wanted, Jameil?"

****

Sere did get the chance to ask Jameil Ali that question. Face to face, in a conference room with the best view of Earthrise money could by.

He greeted her from his seat at the middle of the conference room table. His secretary had led her to the room.

Jameil didn't get up from his seat, not really. He did the half-hearted, handshake and a shoulder bump in place of a hug and a kiss. She asked him the question, before the secretary had even left the room. He didn't deny it. "You're a scientist, Sere, you know how it goes. Some things work, some things don't. We shrugged it off and moved on to the next thing."

"Except for my students. And the others." Half a dozen more, before Sere had blown a gasket, and the A-M secret. Jameil hadn't emailed her directly, that had been his secretary.

"An overly ambitious new hire. She's been fired, and we were the first to file a lawsuit against her. She thought she would impress somebody. Or maybe find something good enough to sell off to Pfizer or the like."

He didn't look at her, the whole conversation. Oh, he gave her the occasional glance, it was impossible not to. Otherwise, he kept his eyes on the handheld in his lap, or the Earthrise behind her.

Sere noticed the smile and the frown. Both with the proper calibration, showing his anger that he'd been taken advantage of by someone he'd hoped would be the next generation of the company, and his cautious optimism that they'd rooted out the bad apples. "That's not us, Sere. Wayne, me, neither of us can bear the idea that our products would do someone harm."

The conversation was short, they hit all the beats. Jameil's story had all the elements. The basic science, and the caution of it that Sere knew so well. A hint that Jameil and Wayne had been taken advantage of by the Earthbound medical industry. The strong response, direct action to carve that tumor away from the body politic...

Sere walked out of her meeting with Jameil Ali sure of nothing but that she'd learned little more than she'd known when she went in. The only firm thing, the only bit and piece that had a concrete identity, was that she could no longer see Jameil as her friend.

Whatever and however life had moved for him, he'd put on the suit and armor of the CEO of his company, and all around was facade.

****

Two weeks later, and Serendipity Oh was also sure that she needed a damned job. The dean had hit her with it: "We don't run according to the traditional model of the terrestrial academy, Doctor Oh. We're much more responsive, progressive, than that."

No tenure, Sere translated. And, no contract...

"As such, I'm afraid that the college has decided that we need to go in a different direction. Please clear your office by the end of the week. The official reference letter from the department will be waiting in your inbox."

Don't even think of getting another academic job, Sere further translated. The dean was making sure she knew she'd been blackballed.

All the years of work and it all went away so quickly. Sere boxed up her shit; she didn't say a word, not even to ask her handheld to play music. Some of that was that she didn't want the random playlist to serve up an accidental dirge. A small part of it was a worry, a little tension in the back of her head, that if Jameil could reach so far as to push her out of her job, then he'd certainly go a little farther and place a listener around her. Just in case she said something actionable on her way out the door.

The biggest reason she didn't say anything, not as she packed up the piles and books and chalk dust, was that Serendipity Oh didn't trust herself not to cry, or scream. Or burn the fucking place to the ground on her way out. The roll of magnesium she'd had in the back of her drawer for God only knows how long called to her. Begged her to put it to its best use.

She didn't do it. She packed it up with the rest of the detritus and made her way home, autocart trundling along behind her.

The rest of the department had ignored her. She'd graduated from the school, undergraduate and doctorate. She'd taught homework sessions, labs, lectures, she'd brought in a bit of research money here and there. Sweet Jesus she'd fucked at least three or four of them and not a single one of the sonsabitches would even look her in the eye as she packed up and walked out.

"No tenure," she reminded herself, standing on the steps and getting one last look at the chemistry building before meandering down the corridor. Every single one of them, department chair to janitor, knew what could happen if they stepped wrong on their own little path.

If they didn't before, they did now. Sere's example, fresh in their minds.

Serendipity Oh walked away from the academic life, the dream she'd built for herself, certain only of two things.

First was that Jameil Ali had managed to make her into an enemy. Not the blood and dagger kind. She'd be doing no hunting, plotting no wars. But someday, somehow, the moment would come. And Jameil Ali would know regret. This she whispered in the caverns of the mind, where naught but her own memories could hear it.

The second thing Serendipity Oh was certain of was that she was glad she'd answered what felt like a random call to her handheld; it came in when she walked home from her meeting with Jameil, two weeks and a lifetime ago. "Doctor Oh, I understand that you're the system expert in mineralogical chemistry."

"Whoever told you that is being generous; who is this?"

"My name's Miller Wright, and I own a mining company. We operate a couple plants on each of the planets, but those are going all right. On the other hand, we've got a new one, out in the asteroid belt, that's giving us six kinds of hell, and I've been told that you're just the expert we need to get our problem fixed..."

Wright's retainer check, covering two years, travel time and expenses and worth about four years of her salary at the university even after the expenses, had cleared her account yesterday. Sere had signed the nondisclosure agreements, she'd booked her travel to the problem child of a plant.

Whatever life had ahead of her, and it was a hell of a wrench to her psyche to have to ditch a couple decades' work, she'd landed pretty well. Serendipity Oh picked two boxes of books and papers to go with her to the asteroid belt, along with a couple of new handhelds, and she got on the rocket to a new world.