Grace started to get up, not looking steady.
Arya said, “Wait a minute. Let me make sure they’re gone.”
Grace sat back down.
Arya headed over to talk to Lee. “Are the journalists gone?”
“I think so. You owe me one for talking to them!”
Arya studied her, “Next time do you want to be the one in here talking to a dying woman about being stazed?”
“No! Sorry,” Lee said. She looked around. “Where’d she go?”
Arya waved, “She’s in the Stade.”
Wide-eyed, Lee said, “You just stazed her?! No more discussion than that? You didn’t talk to Kaem? You didn’t talk to X? What if Staze gets bankrupted by lawsuits and criminal complaints?”
Annoyed, Arya said, “Calm down. We didn’t kill her you know. We put her in stasis to save her life.”
“Other people may not see it that way!”
“And, we didn’t ‘just staze her.’ I recorded a video of her begging to be stazed. Saying she understood there might be unknown risks but that she wouldn’t live to see it proved safe.”
“My God!” Lee said in a distraught tone, then collapsed into a chair where she buried her head in her hands.
I thought engineers were uber rational. That they weren’t supposed to get emotional, Arya thought. She looked at Norm. “I’ve got a Stade engineering problem. Can I saddle you with it while Lee’s getting her shit together?”
“Sure,” he said almost eagerly.
He’s tired of being the helper on other people’s projects, Arya reflected. She explained their need for Stade boxes containing information to be welded to new Stades, and more difficult, having a brief summary in raised or indented lettering on them.
Norm frowned, “What about for small Stades. You know, ones small enough that a box would interfere with their function?”
“Maybe they’d only have a short label directly on their surfaces. What they’re composed of and when they expire. Something like, ‘Air Stade. Expires June 11, 2083.’ Others are going to need to have warning symbols to indicate they contain radioactive materials, toxic chemicals, or biohazards.”
“Okay. I’ll get on it.” He glanced at Lee. “Uh, I’m thinking that we should generate some proof that going into stasis isn’t harmful. You’ll want that before the next person comes in here wanting it. Someone who isn’t quite so sick, where stazing them would be more questionable.”
“And how are you thinking we should do that?”
“Staze a dog for a few days. I was thinking that you could do it with a pinhole camera looking in through the corner of the box. One that can see through an aperture less than one millimeter so it could watch the actual stasis process occur. We should find out what that looks like anyway. Then we film again when we destaze and see if we can splice the videos together to show that, say if the dog’s tail’s wagging when it gets stazed, it finishes that wag as it comes out. In other words, that whatever was going on continues after being interrupted by the stasis.”
Arya had been feeling lectured to and annoyed, but as he spoke, she realized it would be a great idea. Except. “Okay, I can see that, but where are you going to get a dog? I think you can get in a lot of trouble for experimenting on them.”
“It’s not an experiment,” Norm said indignantly. “We know it’s safe. We just need to be able to prove it to other people.”
“Still, where are you going to get a dog?”
“I’d staze mine,” Norm said, “but he’s down in Texas. In a kennel, which he despises.”
“You’d staze your own dog?”
Norm gave her a look, “Didn’t you just staze a human being? I don’t think you should be climbing up on your high horse here.”
Arya gave an embarrassed shrug.
“In fact, I’ve been thinking that instead of putting the poor guy in a kennel when I’m gone, I should just be stazing him. He wouldn’t have to live through those miserable periods in the kennel. And, in the long run, I’d have more years with him. I’d definitely let you guys staze him if you’d let me staze him every time I leave for Texas.”
“Didn’t you just say he was in Texas?” Arya asked.
“He is. But I’d bring him up here for that.”
After thinking a moment, Arya said, “I think it sounds like a good idea. We’ll see what Kaem and Mr. X have to say.”
Norm smirked, “You need their permission to staze a dog, but not a person?”
Arya stared him down. “She was dying, Norm. I’m not at all sure we did it soon enough as it was. I’d do the same for you…” she grinned and lowered an eyebrow, “maybe.”
He grinned back and waved dismissively, “Nah. I’m not worth the trouble.”
She clapped him on the back. “That’s the spirit.”
Arya checked outside. The journalists were gone, so she told Grace it was safe to leave.
Grace said, “I’ve been thinking, I already took the day off work. I’m going to go talk to Simone’s oncologist today if I can. Can I take a copy of your video? In case he has a conniption?”
“Sure,” Arya said. She told her phone’s AI to send Grace a copy of the video. Then had it also send copies to Kaem, Gunnar, Lee, and Emmanuel as well as her desktop computer at Staze.
She wanted to make sure there were enough
