State of War nf-7 Read online

  Howard said, “No, I don’t hear the ringing anymore. But I have noticed if I’m not right next to the phone, I might not notice its cheep. And my wife says I miss half of what she’s saying. Sometimes I can hear her voice, but not quite make out the words. We can’t talk from room to room, if she’s in the kitchen and I’m in the den. She can hear me just fine, but I can’t understand her. And my virgil’s alarm? I don’t pick that up at all.”

  The doctor nodded, making a note on his flatscreen with his stylus. “What about in a crowded room? Any problems?”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to pick a single voice out of the background noise. But that’s normal, right?”

  “Mmm. Let’s have a look.”

  The doctor put the flatscreen down and pulled the ear instrument from where it hung on the wall next to the exam table. He put a little throwaway plastic sleeve on the end, dialed up a light, and stuck it into Howard’s ear.

  “I always meant to ask, what’s this thing called?”

  The doctor pulled it away from Howard’s ear and showed it to him. “This? It’s called an ‘ear-looker.’ ”

  Howard grinned. “Funny,” he said.

  But the doctor, a young guy who looked to be in his early thirties, shook his head. “No, General, I’m serious. The technical name for this is an ‘otoscope,’ but that translates literally as ‘ear-looker.’ ”

  With that, he stuck it back into Howard’s ear and resumed the exam.

  Howard bore the tugging and poking. After a few moments the doctor pulled the scope out. He slipped the plastic throwaway off and tossed it into the foot-operated trash bin. Switching off the instrument’s light, he reracked it and turned back to Howard.

  “The tympanic membrane — your eardrum — looks fine,” he said. “And I don’t think there is any damage to the bony structures past that.”

  “Malleus, incus, stapes,” Howard said.

  “Yes. Hammer, anvil, stirrup. Good to see you’ve done your research.”

  “So what are we talking about here?”

  The doctor leaned back against the wall. “Nerve damage,” he said. “My guess would be that it’s probably in the organ of Corti — those sensory hair cells that make up the auditory epithelium are there. That’s pretty common. In fact, unless you live in a quiet forest all alone and don’t listen to music or have a TV, you’re bound to lose some of your hearing if you live long enough. It’s just one of the costs of a mechanical civilization. Mostly, it’s gradual, and you don’t notice it until it gets bad. Sometimes, though, after a very loud blast very close to one’s unprotected ear, the effect is sudden and pronounced.”

  “Like a gun going off.”

  “Yep.”

  “So what do we do about it?”

  “I’ll have the audiologist give you a hearing exam. When we see what that shows, we’ll know what we can do.”

  Howard nodded, thanked the man, and went straight over to the audiologist’s office.

  The technician there turned out to be a very good-looking young black woman. She asked Howard to sit in a chair, put a set of headphones on him, and handed him a wireless control with a single button on it. There was a sign on the wall certifying that one Geneva Zuri was licensed to practice audiology in the state of Virginia.

  “What kind of a name is ‘Zuri’?”

  “Swahili.” She had a deep, throaty voice. “Some generations removed. My grandfather went back to the old country as a young man and found our distant kin. After that, he started using the family name from before slavery.”

  Howard nodded. Interesting.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’m going to generate some tones from the computer here. When you hear one, push the button.”

  “Okay.”

  She did that for a while, first one ear, then the other. At one point, she introduced a roaring waterfall-like noise in his good left ear while she sent tones to his bad ear. Curious, he asked her about that.

  “What we’ve learned is that people with one weak ear tend to recruit their stronger ear to help out. They are not aware of this, of course. What is actually happening is that the sound is traveling through your head by way of bone conduction. You think you’re hearing a tone in your right ear, but actually you are picking it up in the left, compensating without realizing it. So we mask that ear with white noise to prevent that.”

  After he pushed the button a bunch of times and she made notes on the computer, she gave him another test that checked how loud a noise could get before it became painful.

  The next test included a recorded voice that spoke certain words at various speeds and different volumes. His job was to repeat whatever he heard. The voice had a syrupy southern quality, which drew out some of the sounds and made them harder to distinguish.

  Finally, the audiologist did a repeat of the tone test, then took the earphones off him.

  “All right, sir,” she said. “We’re all done. Take a look.”

  She turned the computer’s flatscreen around to show him a pair of charts. “This one is your left ear, the other is your right. The red lines on both charts represent the norms. The blue lines show the results of your tests. As you can see, for your left ear you’ve dipped some in the high frequencies, but you are pretty solid in the middle and bass range. Over here in the right ear, however, it’s not so good. You’ve dropped way down on the high and middle ranges.”

  He could see that easily enough. “What does it mean?”

  “Well, I’m not a doctor. Your physician should be the one to discuss this with you. I’ll send these results to his flatscreen right away.”

  “Come on,” Howard said. “You do this for a living. You know what it means.”

  She paused, then nodded. “Okay. My guess is you are having trouble hearing people talk, or the phone ring, or the high notes on your old Ray Charles CDs. This chart shows that, and it also shows why. It’s pretty clear that you’ve damaged your hearing.”

  Howard frowned. He’d expected that, of course, but he still didn’t like hearing it. “Will it heal?” he asked. “Will it get any better at all?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir. Not on its own.”

  “What about fixing it, either medically or surgically? Is that an option?”

  She shook her head again. “No, sir. Not in this case. It’s just not that bad a loss, not nearly enough to warrant a cochlear implant. You’d have to be almost stone deaf for that. And we haven’t figured out how to regenerate the nerves in the labyrinth via stem cell or gene therapy. So there’s no medicine that will heal them. It’s a lot like scar tissue, really.”

  He started to ask another question, but before he could, she added, “We can fix it, though, so you will hear pretty much as well as you used to.”

  That sounded interesting. “How?” he asked.

  “Electronic augmentation.”

  Howard felt his stomach twist. A hearing aid, he thought, just like his grandfather used to wear. He shook his head. He was only in his forties, after all. He wasn’t ready for some big, ugly lump behind his ear. What would be next? A cane? A walker? He shook his head again, pushing the mental image away.

  She could tell what he was thinking, of course. She must have seen that same reaction countless times.

  She opened a drawer, reached into it, and pulled out a device exactly like Howard remembered his grandfather wearing. As big as his thumb, it was a big, pale, fleshy-colored thing, with a clear plastic hook on the end. It looked like a little oil can.

  He shook his head again. If he wore that he might as well hang a neon sign around his neck: Yell at me! I’m deaf!

  “This is what we used to use,” she said. “And we still use these, for patients with major loss.”

  She reached back into the drawer. This time, though, when she brought her hand out and opened it to show him, she was holding a tiny, chocolate-colored button, no bigger than the tip of his little finger.

  “And here is the state of the art right now, sir. A one hundr
ed percent digital, multichannel, multiprogrammable MC — for mini-canal — signal processing auditory enhancement device. Digital feedback reduction, noise reduction, gain processing, and compression. This little model has a preamplifier, a twenty-three-bit analog-to-digital converter with a one hundred and thirty-eight decibel dynamic range. The processor chip runs a hundred and fifty million operations per second, with all-digital output to the transducer.”

  Howard just stared. He knew some of the terms, but not all of them.

  “The battery is good for about a week, and it can be programmed to your specific hearing loss and crosscoupled to separate channels. What that means is that if you are in a crowded room full of people jabbering, you’ll be able to hear the guy next to you when he talks. And if you want to listen to music at home alone, you push this little button here and it will shift to a different frequency so you can hear the high notes. Watch.”

  She turned away, did something he couldn’t see, then looked back at him.

  “I have one in my ear. You see it?”

  Howard looked. “No.”

  “Right. And you’re looking for it. Nobody will know you’re wearing it unless you lean over and point it out to them. And best of all, sir, it will bring your hearing pretty close to what it was before. Not perfect, but not far off.”

  “Wow,” he said.

  She grinned. “Yes, sir. We squirt a little rubbery goop in your ear canal, let it set, then take a mold from that so it can be custom fitted. You’ll just tuck it in every morning — if you choose to take it out when you sleep. You don’t really have to. It’s all automatic after that. You’ll want to remove it to shower, though. These things are not really waterproof, but if you get caught in the rain, it will be okay.”

  She pulled the device out of her ear. “See, here’s how you turn it off. Open the battery door like this. When you need to change the battery, you just pop it out like so. Put a new one in, close it, and it’s ready to rock.”

  He had to admit, he was pretty impressed. “And do I have to sell my house to buy this technological miracle?”

  “They run about twenty-eight, twenty-nine hundred retail, sir, but under the Net Force insurance you only copay ten percent. Two hundred and eighty dollars, give or take. Buy the batteries at Costco or on-line and they’ll cost about fifty cents each. It also comes with a maintenance and loss insurance plan free for two years, fifty bucks a year thereafter.”

  He nodded. “And this will do the trick?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I believe it will.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yes, sir. And nobody will be yelling at you like you thought you had to do to your grampa, because they won’t know it’s there.”

  He grinned. “Am I that obvious?”

  “It’s a youth culture, General. Nobody wants to be thought of as old and decrepit. When that slew of baby boomers started hitting their fifties and sixties a few years back, having trouble hearing after all those years of rock and roll, the demand for things like this skyrocketed. They are working on a model now that will run off a capacitor whose power comes from normal movement. Completely sealed. Put it in and forget about it. Just take it out every three or four months to clean your ears, then pop it back in. Until then, however, this will do the job. Welcome to the future, sir.”

  He smiled again. Well. It could be worse. And wearing a little electronic gizmo was better than cupping your hand around your ear and saying “Eh?” like some deaf old fart, wasn’t it?

  A hearing aid. He still couldn’t believe it, though. And no matter how high-tech or marvelous they were, he certainly wasn’t happy about it.

  Washington, D.C.

  Jay sat behind his desk and stared at his flatscreen, thinking about how to break into a bank.

  They almost hadn’t bought this desk. Moving into the new apartment had made more of a dent in their savings than he’d planned. Their furniture plans had been put on hold until one of Saji’s uncles at the wedding had suggested a money dance for the couple.

  According to tradition, the newlyweds accepted dances from various members of the wedding party, who had to

  “purchase” each dance with a donation. What made the money dance funny was that the payment wasn’t just given to the couple. It was pinned to them. By the time the dancing was over, he and Saji had looked like a couple of greenback-stuffed scarecrows. They had made enough from the money dance alone to furnish most of their new condo — including the huge desk in his home office.

  It was funny, Jay knew he was the ultimate forward-thinker. His tastes normally ran to ultramodern, usually involving chrome and leather. This desk was different. It was enormous, for one thing, and made out of solid cherry. It was also antique, with absolutely no provisions for hiding computer peripherals and cabling.

  But Jay didn’t care. He’d fallen in love with this desk the first time he’d laid eyes on it. And Saji had insisted he buy it. No matter that it took up nearly half the floor space in his home office. No matter that it wouldn’t fit into the third bedroom, so that if they ever decided to start a family the baby would end up with the smallest room in the house. No matter that the ancient grained surfaces were as un-Gridley-like as you could imagine.

  He loved that desk, loved the way sitting behind it got his creative juices flowing.

  Except this time it wasn’t working. He just couldn’t seem to get a handle on this bank he was trying to crack.

  He’d worked late at Net Force trying to get his latest VR scenario to work. The bank account number he’d gotten in his trace of the payments from CyberNation had led him to a small branch of the Virginia National Bank out in the suburbs, but no further.

  This particular branch had unfortunately kept up with the security bulletins Net Force issued to computer-intensive businesses from time to time. Their firewall was impressive.

  He’d spent hours as a Swiss guide attempting to scale the Matterhorn, the VR equivalent of an attack on the bank’s firewall. He had found it was like trying to walk up a Teflon-coated slide at a ninety-degree angle. He got nowhere fast.

  Jay could hack his way into most international networks before breakfast. Being shut out by a dinky little domestic bank was frustrating. More than that, it was embarrassing.

  He knew he could go through Legal. There was enough to get a search warrant, but there were problems with that approach. For one thing, serving a warrant might alert the person they were after. That could give them time to prepare, to hide the money or to move it into a legitimate account.

  On the other hand, if Jay could get the name on the account, Net Force would be able to do a little background research. Then they could set a trap and spring it when they were ready. One thing he did not want to do was let CyberNation get away this time, and that meant not tipping his hand too early. Once their target was ID’d, then he could request a warrant and build a chain of evidence. Putting the target under surveillance under those circumstances would probably be much more informative.

  The trick was, how to do it?

  He’d tried brute force, although he supposed one of the NSA supercomputers might have a little more juice than Net Force’s own. He could tap them, add them to the mix, and maybe—

  “Hello? Earth to Jay?”

  With a start, he realized he hadn’t heard — or seen — Saji come into his office. She had perched on one corner of his desk, and he smiled as he looked at her. All this time, and the sight of her could still make him smile.

  “Practicing your meditation, darling?” she asked.

  He grinned, shook his head. Caught bringing work home. Again.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  She came around behind him and started rubbing his shoulders.

  Jay leaned his head back against her and sighed. She had started doing this on their honeymoon. Initially, they had planned to go to Bali, but changed their minds at the last minute and ended up going to Spain instead. They had spent most of the two-week trip on Formentera, a
n island off the coast of Ibiza. The place they’d stayed had truly been get-away-from-it-all; no electricity, no telephone, or even net connection. He’d felt a little claustrophobic at first — had spent a lot of time with his virgil, bringing up old games he never bothered with when he had VR. Saji had started giving him massages as a way of relaxing him.

  After a while the charm of the island — hot sun, the beautiful clear water, and time alone with Saji — had relaxed him more than he’d been in years. She hadn’t given him a back rub since they got back. Until now.

  He wished they could go back to that island right now and forget about Net Force and CyberNation.

  Hmm. Maybe he could try piggybacking a worm with a transfer, capture some keystrokes—

  He became aware of Saji’s breath in his ear.

  “Whoa!”

  “Oh, you are still here. Good. Remember me? You know, we got married a while back?”

  He laughed. “Sorry. I’m here! I’m here!”

  “All right, then, Mr. I’m-Here, what did I just say a moment ago?”

  “Uh—”

  “I thought so.” She leaned forward to see his flatscreen. “So what’s so important that you managed to go into VR without the gear? Pretty impressive concentration, by the way. You might almost think you had studied with a brilliant Buddhist.”

  “I did,” Jay said, “only he was a lot older and uglier than you.”

  Now she grinned, but she also shook her head. “Uh-uh. You’re not getting off that easy, Gridley. Now give.”

  Jay told her about the bank, how he couldn’t get in.

  Saji listened. It occurred to Jay, and not for the first time, that he was one of the luckiest men on earth to have found her. Someone who listened to him, who cared about his problems. And he’d almost backed out and blown it.

  When he finished his explanation, Saji stood there for a few seconds without speaking, her hands motionless on his shoulders. Then she said, “Okay, no problem.”