Free MIND FIELDS by Brad Aiken Page B

had to be made up, but she didn’t mind a bit.  Rocky was always a gentleman and always paid in cash.
    “Don’t be a stranger now, Rocky.”  She winked as she handed him his coat. 
    He gave her a kiss on the cheek and headed out the door, bracing himself against the cold night air.  The icy wind slapped against his face, and he tucked his chin down as he walked toward the car.  He didn’t notice the three men who scrambled for their coats and exited Belle’s just after him.
    The last thing that he could remember when he awakened in the ER was that he had been sitting in Belle’s Place, enjoying the show.
    “Christ! This guy’s got White House clearance.  Look at his ID card.”
    Rocky awakened in a bit of a fog.  He saw two men in white coats standing over him.  One of them was holding his wallet and showing it to the other. 
    He tried to sit up and grab it.  “Ahh,” he yelped as he plunked back down to the gurney grabbing his head.  He felt the warm, sticky blood oozing from the left side of his skull, and looked at his hand in disbelief as he pulled it away, covered in red.
    “Whoa there, big fella.  Hold still.”  The two men in the white coats reached down and restrained his arms.  “Just lay still, we’re gonna get you some help.”
    Rocky wasn’t quite sure what they were saying, but he didn’t like being held down. He struggled to pull free, but his usually powerful arms were like Jello at his side.  “Let … me … go!” he shouted, as he tried once more to break free.
    “Five milligrams of Valium IV push, stat!” was the last thing he heard.

Chapter eight

      Russell Stetson, the senator from Maryland, had served for the past nine years on the Senate Subcommittee on Nanotechnology.  The committee had been formed shortly after he won the election for his first term.  It had been placed under the direction of a senior senator from Connecticut, Stanton Cole.  Cole was one of the Senate’s old-timers.  Having served in the Senate for eighteen years as a levelheaded moderate, he had the respect of the leaders of both parties.  When nanotechnology rose to the forefront of clinical medicine, the committee had been organized to deal with the inevitable ethical issues that would concern the public.  Nanotechnology would enable physicians to alter the human body in ways never known before.  Not since the arguments involving cloning had a new technology raised so much controversy.  At what point would a body full of nanobots cease to be human?  Would a body that had most of its organs replaced or augmented by miniature internal machines become a machine at some point? 
      In order to allay the public’s fears, the legislators decided to have a congressional committee rule on these issues rather than leaving them to the discretion of entrepreneurs who stood to benefit from the exploitation of nanotechnology.  The Senate Subcommittee on Nanotechnology was formed as a branch of the Senate Health Care Committee, and the job of chairing the committee went to the very well respected and very uncontroversial Senator Cole.
      Russell Stetson had spent his first year in the Senate getting a feel for the political battlefield that was Washington, but he was determined to make his mark as quickly as possible.  He lobbied hard to get onto the new committee, realizing that it would enable him to deal with some of the most controversial issues of his day.  He spent hours boning up on nanotechnology, including wining and dining one of its foremost proponents, JT Anderson.  By his fourth year on the committee, he was the vice-chair, with more power over decisions regarding the authorization of human research than anyone in the country, save for the venerable Stanton Cole.
      Senator Stetson had his own agenda for nanotechnology.  In it, he saw the potential for the ultimate political power: control of the human mind.  His idea was to develop nanobots that could be placed into a human