“I have clearance to do this, and it will be done,” said Granger as he slipped the jack wire into Sunny’s port.
The girl screamed high and deathly until just at the peak of her wail, she was abruptly cut off. An eerie stillness followed and an instant change from pleading resistance to total surrender. Gone was the bubbly inventive drug addict. Now all that remained was the shell. The soul had flown. Maybe it would grow back, but it was gone today.
Hauser and O’Brian looked at each other and shook their heads. The captain would get his report. The department would get cooperation from federal agencies, and both of them would get commendations.
There was something sad, though, about Sunny Parker. Tom seemed resigned to going to prison without his mate.
Hauser and O’Brian closed the door of the car and drove her back to Minneapolis with the fifteen kilos of Heaven. Granger would get it eventually, but they had it now.
Granger had downloaded all of Sunny’s memories into his external drive. He had wiped her clean as if she were a slate of chalkboard.
Hauser and O’Brian drove the two drug traffickers back and booked them.
* * *
Granger walked into the lobby of the ancient air terminal. He sat down and began to peruse the data he had gotten from Sunny. He found a node he couldn’t identify. Sure, there were all Sunny’s connections and contacts in the black market. He touched the node with his mind and it began to expand. It grew and shifted. Of course it was just a mental picture and not a visual one, but the way these things worked for Granger, the picture was real enough. The node uncoiled and moved across the wire to enter Granger’s mind.
Sunny had left a trap-door virus for anyone who molested her mind, her implant, or her list of connections. Granger’s eyes curled up into the tops of his eye sockets and his body began to shake. The virus removed all of Sunny’s data and moved on to Granger’s private memories. In two short minutes Granger was stripped of all his higher functions, and the case against Sunny was gone. Hauser and O’Brian had the drugs but Granger’s case, so carefully put together, was erased.
The virus expanded its scope to include Granger’s bodily functions and began to attack the heart and lungs. Breathing shut down and heartbeat dropped to two beats per minute. Granger’s body shook for a final minute, and then he was gone.
It would be two hours before Hauser and O’Brian learned of Granger’s passing. For Sunny it was a great benefit. She leaned into Tom’s ear at the interrogation center and said, “Granger ate my poison pill. You’re gonna have to do the legal stuff, Thomas. I am not feeling well today.”
“Yeah, but Sunny girl, you got him. You really got him,” Tom said.
She thought back to the memory of shooting Granger and touched her now empty link. “We may have to start all over, but Granger’s gone. He’s not coming back.” She leaned back and smiled.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A Short Biography
William Strawn Douglas writes under the name W. Strawn Douglas, because there are too many more famous William Douglas's he'd otherwise have to compete with for name space!
This Douglas, born in 1961, grew up immersed in the medical system. His father was a physician at the world famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His mother was a nurse and nursing instructor. A grandfather was a physician as well.
Douglas currently resides in the U.S. in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Previous to his 2016 move there, he spent more than two decades as a resident at Minnesota's State Security Hospital, in Saint Peter, Minnesota. He had been committed there by the courts in 1993, diagnosed as Mentally Ill and Dangerous. That was after he assaulted a young woman during a schizophrenic episode, his disordered thinking wanting to create an "incident" to draw "the law's" attention to local drug distribution he found objectionable.
Douglas has attended the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. He is a U.S. Marine veteran, and has worked in the oilfields of Wyoming and as a cook at the famed Seward Café on the West Bank of Minneapolis. He has worked as a graphic artist, and in life before Saint Peter, he was also an avid bicyclist.
Douglas admits to having been active for years as a user of what he calls short order soft drugs. He says he has even participated in distributing some of them. But he also claims to have never used the harder addictive street drugs.
These days, Douglas' schizophrenia is stable and controlled by medication. He spent much of his time at Saint Peter reading science fiction and works on philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, conspiracy theories, and drugs and addiction. Within his studies, Douglas has maintained a focus on ideas about how the shapes of future governments could impact personal liberty, and he has tried to combine all of his interests within some of his published science and speculative fiction.
One of Douglas' more recent works, Quarantine of the Mind, is subtitled "Obedience Training for Adult Humans: Preventative Imprisonment for Crimes Not Yet Committed." This work of non-fiction is grounded in his personal battle with mental illness, and his experiences with his illness at the mental institution where he lived for more than two decades under an "indeterminate" sentence.
About his writing, Douglas says science fiction will continue to be one, but not his only emphasis. Science Fiction, he says, oftentimes makes it difficult to make a serious point, because trying to do so "while writing about bug-eyed aliens and flying saucers" and similar things can be pretentious.
Douglas’ web site is at: https://wstrawndouglas.efoliomn.com/Home
Other Titles by the Author
Quarantine of the Mind
Non-Fiction. Copyright 2014. Chipmunkapublishing, United Kingdom.
Ultra Murder - Black Hole Drive (Two Short Novels by W. Strawn Douglas)
Fiction. Revised combined edition. Copyright 2014.
Black Hole Drive
Fiction. Revised and Republished Copyright 2012.
Ultra Murder
Fiction. Copyright 2012.
The Joy Engineers
Fiction. Copyright 2010.
Mental Health Imprisonment: One Case
Non-fiction. Copyright 2007; extensively revised and republished Copyright 2011.
Black Hole Drive and Other Stories
Fiction. Copyright 2001.
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