Collective Intelligence

the right thing.”

  “Indeed I am.”

  Jankowiak stepped past Hampden into the foyer, turned hard left and hurried out of GenCorp's front lobby.

  “You are under arrest!” An authoritative voice bellowed. “Stay where you are!”

  It was a uniformed cop, not a security guard. Jankowiak's legs faltered.

  “Stay on your feet!”

  In response, Jankowiak turned and staggered. The cop's hand was on his gun. He pushed his feet into the ground to make them move but they wouldn't comply. His temples throbbed and his vision instantly blurred. The horizon, opaque and vague, seemed to lift toward his face. He raised his hands to break his fall. In slow motion, the ground rose up to meet his face.

  “Get up!”

  The sudden jolt had stunned him and Jankowiak couldn't move, although his ears worked perfectly. A flurry of advancing footsteps abruptly stopped.

  “Help me,” he whispered. “I've done nothing wrong.”

  His plea was silenced by two blows of a baton against his back and head and his attacker's loud voice. “Do not resist!”

  “I'm not resisting,” Jankowiak croaked through the pain.

  “You were warned!” The voice hissed in his ear as the third strike sent him to black.

  Turmoil

  Jankowiak regained consciousness. He was propped roughshod against a concrete barrier. His head throbbed and the nape of his neck felt split with a searing pain. He tried to reach back but found that he couldn't move his arms. They were cuffed at the wrists and secured behind his back. Now that he noticed, his compressed hands burned in discomfort.

  Jankowiak's brief terror had passed and his eyes were working properly again. He took stock of his position.

  He didn't like what he saw.

  With consternation he realized that he was in GenCorp's front courtyard—on display at the company entrance. Curiously, he was unattended, although he was hardly alone.

  In the courtyard there was a flurry of activity. The City's Finest were rummaging through his personal effects, assisted by GenCorp's security personnel. His briefcase had been emptied and the strewn contents of all its folders and pouches were under examination.

  A few feet away another cop was hacking into his laptop.

  Jankowiak shifted his buttocks against the concrete to find a more satisfactory position. Instead he pressed his bound wrist bones into the unyielding surface. He winced but no one noticed. His accused folly was garnering all the attention.

  A dozen yards away, positioned in front of the Corporate logo, Elliot Hampden was talking to a very attractive woman.

  Jankowiak snorted softly in derision. She was a reporter.

  The reporter was dressed smartly in a navy blue suit jacket, matching skirt and a off-white blouse. Her blouse revealed considerably more cleavage than the GenCorp Admins', part and parcel for her life in front of a camera.

  Bustling about her and Hampden was a bevy of laborers at full task. She ignored the crew as it set lamps and dropped cables and tethered them to a nearby van. Hampden pretended to not notice but occasionally he wrung his hands in anticipation.

  Jankowiak's concerns grew larger. The van was emblazoned with a television station logo and it was outfitted with a satellite transmitter.

  A cop walked by.

  “I'm hurt,” Jankowiak's voice cracked but the cop didn't pay any attention. He repeated his call for help several times to no avail. Instead, the space between him and the busy throng seemed to enlarge.

  Shapner joined Hampden and the reporter. She'd been expecting him and she looked relieved. Hampden bowed away.

  A producer handed the reporter a microphone and she spoke several words that Jankowiak could not hear into the foam padding. The producer nodded and she began to interview Shapner.

  “It's been a most interesting hour...” her voice carried, strong and clear across the suddenly silent courtyard to Jankowiak's ears.

  Jankowiak lay back and closed his eyes. He knew he could no longer stop the nightmare from unfolding. His fear returned. Blood surged through his head and stopped his ears from hearing. He missed the next exchange.

  I need to know what happens. A small voice said inside him and Jankowiak willed himself to pay attention.

  Shapner was speaking.

  “R&D is GenCorp's lifeblood,” he stated. “We invest a billion dollars each year to develop new drugs.” He glanced in deprecation at Jankowiak.

  The producer had scripted the cue and was already cutting the camera lens to the bound scientist. Having been staged for his part, Jankowiak was disheveled and cowered.

  Guilty by appearance.

  Shapner's voice wearied. “That cost pales in comparison to what we stand to lose to intellectual property theft.” He carried on in a self-righteous tone, a dirge against the respected man that GenCorp had, with good will, invited to address their troops.

  Jankowiak seethed. It would be hours or days before he would be able to speak publicly. By then the damage would be irreparable. He searched the surroundings for an adversary. On camera his wandering eyes appeared unrepentant and hardened.

  As Shapner pontificated the men rifling through Jankowiak's briefcase completed their search. It had been fruitless.

  The Lead Sergeant approached Shapner, who was still on camera, and Jankowiak saw him flinch. Hampden sprung into action, intercepting the cop and pulling him aside. The reporter's eyes grew wide and she nearly smiled at the sudden fracas.

  Jankowiak tuned into Hampden's discussion: The police were getting restless; the Lead Sergeant had announced his intention to leave.

  Hampden stiffened and argued but seemed unable to dissuade the police from withdrawing.

  With indifference the cop turned away from Hampden and, pointedly, walked through the camera's line-of-sight. He spoke loudly and authoritatively and his troops began to withdraw.

  The change in events clearly frustrated Hampden. He paced with agitation, retracing the path between Jankowiak and the conference room window, followed closely by the cur of the corporation's security officer.

  Suddenly, Hampden stopped and resolved his confusion. He spoke curtly to the security officer.

  The rent-a-cop sprung away in double time. Within a minute he reappeared, bearing a handful of documents. Jankowiak recognized them as the foolscap he'd abandoned within the building.

  As the reporter wrapped up her interview, Hampden shuffled and sorted the papers. He chased down the Lead Sergeant and handed them to him.

  A frown tensed the policeman's face.

  “Surely you can't expect me to treat this as evidence,” he snapped for all to hear.

  The producer had already cut the live feed. He motioned to his crew to restart the recorders.

  “Once you examine his electronic records I think you will find the substantiation you need.” Hampden said with confidence. “You've already seen our scientist's communiques.”

  Jankowiak heard the unfounded confidence.

  What's he talking about? Jankowiak wondered.

  “I've cracked the encryption,” a geek in uniform announced.

  The Lead Sergeant peered over his shoulder at the electronics expert.

  “What have you found?” he said with impatience.

  “Sir, the encryption was practically non-existent...”

  “Spare me the details. What's on that computer that I need to know about?”

  “Do you mean his email?” the geek stepped back. He had not expected a challenge from his boss.

  The Lead Sergeant stared.

  “There are a number of communications with a GenCorp scientist. They were all in the Trash but stupidly, they hadn't been deleted.”

  “Have they been read?”

  “It appears so.”

  “Humph.” The Lead Sergeant guffawed. He sensed that GenCorp was not playing straight but his hands were cuffed. Big corporations had lawyers that could eat him alive if he failed to follow the playbook. Hampden probably knew the
protocols better than he did. There wasn't time to determine whether the evidence was real or manufactured. He had to book every shred.

  “Read him his rights,” the Lead Sergeant ordered to the electronics expert.

  “Sir, we haven't talked to him yet,” the geek protested.

  “Follow the protocols,” the Sergeant admonished. “We're being held to a higher standard.”

  “Yes, sir,” the geek replied and hastened to formalize the arrest.

  Year 11

  Severance

  “I may not be able to accept any new students this year,” Jankowiak stated.

  From across his desk the Department Chair, Tom Bailey, pursed his lips and frowned. He then spun his chair a few degrees and gazed in thought.

  The desk was strategically placed in front of a large window. With the blinds fully retracted, strong sunlight streamed into the room and, from Jankowiak's vantage, Bailey appeared as a silhouette. The cheap trick disgusted Jankowiak.

  In Jankowiak's opinion, a common assessment among the department's faculty, Bailey had had a mediocre success as a researcher who had earned tenure at a time when there had been a dearth of qualified candidates in the computational field. Some snidely proclaimed that he couldn't meet present standards.

  Bailey may not have been a stellar researcher but he wasn't a dullard. Before he fossilized into the department dinosaur he accepted the role of administrator, something else nobody wanted at the time, and transformed his career.

  As deficient as he was in academic novelty, he became overbearing in expectation. For the associate and junior professors, Bailey set rigorous policies for publishing. For the tenured, he preached the acquisition of grant money. He then used the department's cut to woo new faculty from the bright, the