The Day Oscar Went Missing

I was in the shower when I got word that Oscar was missing. The ID Tile showed that Lana was calling. I bypassed the wall comm unit, stepped through the bodydryer, pulled on my shorts and reached for my CommVest.  The motion sensor shut the water off as I popped the earpiece into my ear. I heard waterworks of a different kind. Lana’s wailing warned me that something was seriously wrong. Lana doesn’t fall apart over nothing.

When Lana got up this morning, Oscar was nowhere to be found. It was a wasted energy, but I asked if she had logged into his Digital Angel site. I knew that’s the first thing she would do.

She had. For her efforts, no data at all. No heart rate. No body temperature. Not even a global position readout. It was as if he didn’t exist, or at least as if his transmitter had never been implanted.

No reason to panic. Several things might prevent a response from his angel. It has been dark and rainy the past few days. The solar battery might have run down, or maybe solar flares blocked reception. He could have wandered into a dense magnetic field and wiped it clean. If he was close enough to the airport, an ATB could have got it. (That’s Automatic Transmitter Blackout for non-aviation related transmitters that don’t also support life.) Or the bill for the transmitter service got lost and the GPTP (Global Positioning Transmission Provider) shut it off.

I scrambled into my clothes and pulled on the CommVest in under three minutes.

Pulling my glasses out of the breast pocket, I knicked my finger and cursed as I adjusted the right lens and programmed it for monitor viewing.

Using my right eye to scan my e-mail and traffic/weather check page, I pulled on my shoes and adjusted the controls to program the soles for walking on cement.

Traffic check info showed me that walking would be faster than driving. Weather check told me there was an 80% chance I wouldn’t get rained on. One of my messages was a reminder to vote.

On the off chance there was anything interesting, I checked my Spam mailbox: 120 messages, the subject of most being  “Urgent” or “Important,” although they had the good sense not to set the alarm flag (a dead giveaway).  I deleted them all without looking at them. One that got past the first cut started with “Congratulations on changing your life.” I deleted that and two others like it. I programmed myself another message to clean out my “Cookie Tin” on my Internet PDS (personal data site) so I wouldn t be the target of so many Spammers. Possibly a fruitless effort. As soon as technology and I find a way to outsmart the Spammers, they find a new way to bury us in junk mail.

I punched my CommVest music controls for a program of Classic Jazz, stuffed the earpiece into my vest pocket and put on my hat at a jaunty angle, enough to look dapper but not so much that I couldn’t hear the audio phones. Here I admit to a flash of vanity: I wear a custom-designed fedora instead of the standard baseball cap. When you’re in my business, you can’t get serious work done in a baseball cap. Besides, my Fedora accommodates bigger speakers with better directional support so it doesn’t need those silly earflaps. Of course I could get implants, but I’ll wait till they shake out all the bugs before I let someone stick something in my head. The situation with Oscar’s implants might be proof that I was right.

Time for my favorite meal, breakfast. I headed down to the lobby. I usually eat on the run, so I programmed several “meals” into my CommVest (debit card number included). As soon as I came in view of the snack machines, I said “Doctor Pepper,” and “Moon Pie.” The words were no sooner out of my mouth than my choices thunked down into their respective chutes. The bad news is that the CommVest’s cell phone isn’t the only one that heard me order my breakfast. My neighbor Joelynn’s eight-year old nephew makes a sport of beating me to the snack machines and helping himself to my orders. I hit the redial button and grabbed my refreshments before anyone else could avail themselves of my largesse.

Election only two working days away, I made a quick stop to vote. At the nearest ATM, I pulled out my plastic Voter Registration card, swiped it through the slot provided, and pressed my left forefinger to the scanner. When a happy face appeared on the screen, I pressed the OK icon to begin.

Waiting for pictures of the Place 1 candidates to appear, I reflected on how far the voting process had come in the past four years. The government moved fast after the “Florida fiasco” of the 2000 Presidential election to get the bucks to local governments to update their voting machines and ballots. A little Company called MicroVote might have made a killing with their ATM-style voting machines, but an electronics wizard at a tiny bank in Texas  (located across the street from a courthouse) managed to code a simple, elegant voting program for ATMs. Now banks get a small per-vote fee from local governments for hosting the voting, and the machines are updated and maintained at no cost to the voters. More important, as soon as the last vote is cast, the tallies are in. Made just about everyone happy except for the guy who had a contract from IDG Books to write “Voting for Dummies.”

The ATM gave me five minutes to complete my ballot. I didn’t need that much time. Within three minutes, I touched the Place 10 candidate picture, a waving flag appeared on the screen, and the card slot regurgitated my Voter Registration card. Constitutional Right exercised, I set out to find Oscar.

My first call was to Doc Jameson to find out if he thought Oscar’s implant might have malfunctioned. He checked Oscar’s records and confirmed that the model used on Oscar had been recalled. That model quits working permanently when the wearer passes through an ATB field.

The only places authorized to use ATB fields are airports and hospitals. The airport is 20 miles away. The only hospital within walking distance of Lana’s place is the Lord of Mercy. I called Lana. She said they passed it yesterday.

Now I knew where Oscar was yesterday, but that didn’t tell me where he was now. Gadgets out of the picture, I resorted to low-tech reasoning: When someone disappears from an apartment building, the person most likely to guess his whereabouts is the manager.

It wasn’t quite lunch yet. I took a chance that Ted would still be in his office. I rang the bell. Ted opened the door, smiling ear to ear,  “Hey, Oscar, look who’s here.” There sat Oscar, nonchalantly chewing a hot dog.

Ted offered me a cup of coffee. I told him I had to get back to Lana, and motioned for Oscar to follow.

When we arrived at Lana’s place Oscar bounded inside eagerly. Lana threw herself on the floor and hugged his neck. Oscar wagged his tail and joyfully licked her face. Lana looked up at me with tears in her eyes. “Thanks for finding Oscar, Uncle Phil.” She got up and hugged me, too. I told her to tell her mom I’d pick her up in the morning, and we’d take Oscar to the Vet for a new implant. I didn’t make any money this morning, but what price do you put on making a 10-year old girl happy?

Joyce s note:
Virtually all the “gadgets” featured in this story are based on recent news publications describing the technology. Some of them I dreamed up, only to read about them in the Wall Street Journal or on DummiesDaily a few days later. The Spam mailbox was one. Digital Angel is scheduled to be rolled out in the next few months. MicroVote is indeed working on a voting machine. The CommVest is already being used in Europe under a different name (which I can’t recall.) As for ATB (Automatic Transmitter Blackout) and programmable shoes--figments of my imagination. Same for Caller ID tiles in the shower, although Bill Gates probably has them already.