Wilson Gave The Two Gifts—Now What Happens?

House stared at the partially unwrapped package for a moment longer, mentally drinking in what it contained. Wilson gave an obviously irritated sigh. "So what is it?"

"It's a dead baby."

Wilson's eyes opened wide and began speaking more rapidly. "I'm sorry. He said he was giving you proof that you need to take his view seriously. He never said—"

"That's exactly what he was doing." House swiveled the package to reveal a hard acrylic isolette holding a dead baby, gray and slightly mummified, connected to leads and tubes of all descriptions. House pulled a small stack of printer paper off the top of the isolette and held it to the Lexan wall for Wilson to see. "Readings here turned to the top show it died, but it didn't turn. Why? This is a sterile isolette. THERE'S A GERM INVOLVED IN THIS." House shook his head, staring. "God or Satan is an intelligent legion of GERMS, and he's using his powers for the dark side. This can't be. It can't BE. I MUST be hallucinating!" He wobbled. He sat down, hard, on the floor. His eyes rolled back—

. . . he was startled awake by a strong, acrid smell. "Uchh—what IS that? Apple vinegar?"

"Straight from a dead battery," said the masked man, "I don't have smelling salts."

"I didn't faint. I was hoping you had a pocket to pick."

"Your vitals say otherwise." The masked man pointed at the isolette's monitor, with new wires attached from it to House and a new cylindrical battery.

"I may have slightly overdosed on your sleep agent. Didn't handle the stress of your gift well with my system overloaded. Where's Wilson?"

"He's in disposed."

"Anyway, you don't need to scare me anymore; I'm on your side now. Where's Wilson?"

The masked man cocked his head. "I told you, he's in disposed. I'm not trying to scare you."

House looked at the masked man, incredulous. "My doctor, the only real doctor I know alive, and the only man I know that I really trust never to hurt me is unavailable, I'm being cared for by someone with no medical training who kidnapped me and threatened torture to me and my friends, and I'm powerless and in restraints, possibly suffering from an overdose and a concussion, and you're NOT trying to scare me? I'm NOT looking forward to Halloween this year."

"You aren't in restraints. You know that because you tried to pick my pockets twice."

"What are you wearing, anyway, Frodo? Is this mithril?" House wobbled.

"Kevlar."

"No pockets at all, huh?"

"No."

House rolled to face away and threw up. "Huh. I can't think of a literary reference for a man with no pockets. Imagine yourself in a book for a moment. What would you call yourself?" He turned to look back at the masked man. House frowned. His eyes widened. He sat up very slowly, holding his head and his breath. He stared at the masked man. "Huh."

"How much did you use?"

House blinked. "Um. Around thirty milliliters, sir. Vicodin chaser."

"You really shouldn't be conscious right now."

"Move me to the lab. Bring the white board. I'll work when I wake up. Where's Wilson?"

"He's in the bathroom. Fish didn't agree with him."

House's eyes crossed. He tried to uncross them by pulling his face back around his skull. They stayed crossed. "You tell that fish that my friend is IN DISPOSED, and that he should keep his opinions to himself. Wilson's a good doctor. How did the fish get cancer?" House threw up again and began to fall—

. . . and the masked man neatly caught him. The masked man sighed, picked House up completely off the floor, and carried him out of the room.

House came to on the recliner. It faced the same room, but the back wall was missing to reveal an underequipped lab on the bare concrete floor with stainless steel tables. House stood, grabbing his cane, limped hurriedly to the kitchenette, opened a can of green beans, set them to boil, and advanced on the white board, eyes wide. He began scribbling and sketching immediately.

About an hour later, Wilson entered the viewing room. "Glad to see you up and about, House. I didn't see definitive evidence of a concussion, but I wasn't really happy having to let you sleep off your overdose. I'm supposed to tell you that the electron microscope will have to wait, and that we're about to test some immersion oil to make sure the formulation is okay. He said he had to make some at the manufacturer he found. Something about the mix already in process."

"As long as you're carrying messages," House turned slightly to Wilson, "Tell him we don't want the electron microscope anyway. I have to speak to him about a different kind of microscopy. We're going to need some unconventional equipment. Recovered from the bad fish?"

Wilson looked surprised at the question. "Yes . . . thank you. You—seem to be hard at work."

"Our captor is the scariest kind of person. Stay on his good side at all costs."

Wilson smiled thinly. "I have been anyway. Everything he's wanted has been more than reasonable. What's—the scariest kind of person?" He looked at House sideways, studying House's rapid scribblings.

"He doesn't know who he is. He doesn't react to my jibes, calling him by references to movies or books because he doesn't identify with anyone. Let's stick to Quixote. That should be safe. His sanity might depend on sticking to his goals."

Wilson nodded. "He IS rather—driven. I get the idea he's not going to torture us though. Our goals are aligned anyway. There wouldn't be any point." He pulled out a Post-It pad and a pen. "He'll be checking in later and asked me to make a list of what you might need?"

House began listing them immediately. "Samples of every kind of wire he can find with specs. Tools to work it. Batteries, electronic doodads, stuff to make remotes with. Several stopwatches. Fiber optic cable of every kind. Micromanipulators. Sterile environment stuff. Multiple lenses, preferably with one flat side and one convex. FlexSeal or PlastiDip. Sterilizing agents of various kinds. Glass slides. Crash helmets."

"Crash helmets?" Wilson was on his fifth post-it. "Why crash helmets?"

"I'm of the opinion that the dead aren't smart enough to raise the faceplate or take them off. Easy way to make them safe for experimentation. Football helmets might work, too. At some point, I'll want a centrifuge and various kinds of lens glass and the spectroscope powered up. Carbon dater. Geiger counter. High-res digital video recorder with a programming interface. Reticulation scale. Mathematical table and interpolation texts. Texts on optical and compound microscopes. Micrometers, micro-calipers. Some six-foot two-by-fours. Nails, screws, some other hand tools. And some drafting paper and pencils. I'll probably start making him some drawings. The fact that he's a good technician will come in handy."

Wilson scribbled hastily. "Okay? Tell me about the dead baby. I noticed you haven't touched it."

"It's not just a sterile isolette. The kid had SCID."

Wilson looked completely blank for a moment. "Some Crazy Immune Disorder?"

"Not bad, Wilson. 'Bubble Boy Syndrome.' The pinnacle of immune problems. I went through the rest of the chart. Absent T-cells, low NK cells, B-cells on strike. Navajo type. One parent was half Navajo. Kid was approaching three months old with no failure to thrive; good muscle resistance. There is a germ that we have, that this boy doesn't. There's a problem with that."

"Which is?"

"This baby had E. Coli in his gut. E. Coli made in a lab from his parents' donations. Experimental treatment, you know the process?"

"Gut training with lab assist? That's where you isolate the one microbe by species? Painstaking work. Then put it in under controlled conditions."

"Right with the food. What're those gems with the round top and the flat bottom?"

Wilson blinked. "Cabochons?"

"Cabochons. Four or five perfectly circular cabochons of various thicknesses of every translucent gem he can find in every color. No flaws. Samples of amber from various historical eras. We may need them to change the refraction rate. While he's at it, tell him to grab some findings and jewelry-making stuff. I miss Ann, and making her a gift might settle my nerves. You can tell her you picked out the stuff for it. I'll want a rock polisher too, for the amber samples."

Wilson nodded slowly. "She said she likes opals. Why is a man who doesn't know who he is more dangerous?"

House stopped scribbling an equation. He turned to Wilson. "Moral code is a part of identity. You've heard the phrase 'core values?' You've also heard people say they 'weren't the type' to do things? Anyone who actually manages to foil him might find he's willing to become a genuine sociopath for a bit. He did promise he wouldn't hurt us when we fail, but is he really a man of his word? How can he be, when he doesn't know who he is? You realize, of course, he's probably punishing himself for not saving someone. Someone he cared about a LOT more than he cares about us—or himself."

Wilson frowned, eyes widening. "Well that—that I can imagine. People who knew him would have depended on him. He's alone. The mask could be penance for not living up to he was. For shame." Wilson looked troubled. He nodded. "All right. I can get you office supplies right away, obviously. I'll go see what we have left." He exited the viewing room. House stifled a smile, turning back to the white board.

HHHHHHHHHH

Wilson was hunched over the desk, frowning, when the masked man silently came to the door of the office. The masked man leaned on the doorframe to speak. "Physics isn't your usual subject, doctor."

Wilson startled, then made a hesitant smile. "I'm worried."

"That would be why you didn't give him any hand tools, just the office supplies. You're worried he'll try something."

"I'm . . . worried about both of you."

"That's natural. I'm your captor, and he's not known for stability."

"I should ask you whether there's anything you want to talk about."

"You mean, other than my goals."

"Well, yes. House didn't really go through shock when the world ended the way most of us did. He saved me probably a hundred times just between the first two locations we moved through. He's going through it now, I think. Did you? I mean, did you have anyone to help you through things at first?"

"I was used to handling things alone before. The people I knew died too quickly for me to help. Some of the people I would have been tempted to NOT save died too quickly for me to react."

Wilson nodded. "So you figured it was time to go federal, rather than local."

"I helped a few hundred people. I made some moats around a few buildings and killed thousands of the dead before I 'went federal,' but yes. No one as capable as me was as detached as I was. So I recruited some local talent for some resources and data toward my goals and dropped them off afterwards with supplies as payment. It's a pattern I quickly adapted and stuck with."

"If you never torture us, I'm going to ask Ann Gee to come with me and accompany you, even if House doesn't want to come. Thanks to him, I've been cancer-free for five years this time."

The masked man cocked his head. "I don't think I'll be asking any of you along, though I will ask you to expect my return and drop copies of your work for my retrieval in the meantime. I'll show you how I want you to code your drops and point me to them. Any ATM less than a mile from a highway will do. I'm going to leave you ten weatherproof containers and enough rechargeable batteries and charging systems to last about a decade. I'll keep practicing and learning on my own in the meantime."

Wilson nodded. "So you really are planning on leaving, like I thought. When are you going?"

"I'll be leaving as soon as House has done as much as I think he can. I will be going tonight for supplies and tomorrow to fill the other requests he's made. Do you think he can really make a multi-stage compound microscope with gemstone lenses?"

"That's—part of what I was trying to look up. Apparently the fewer lenses used and the more perfect the material, the better. There's some constants here I'm not familiar with. It LOOKS like the goal would be to beat four thousand times magnification, but at that ratio? Clarity would be sacrificed even with immersion oil. He was unusually honest about wanting a side project and even more unusually willing to keep working."

"And that scared you." The masked man nodded. "I'll be visiting him shortly. Ann has agreed to come with me tonight. She made dinners for us to reheat and went to bed. You might not tell House that." The masked man walked out.

HHHHHHHH

A panel in the lab ceiling opened, and the masked man slid down a small length of rope, playing it out from a small cloth bag as he descended. House barely looked up from the drawing he was working on. The masked man sat on a stool and waited for House to look up again. As House looked up, the masked man tossed a small parcel onto the nearest table. "I'm glad to see you've been productive. Why do you want gems instead of glass lenses for the microscope?"

"I'm figuring the expense won't matter, so it's time to find out if I can change the distortion rate of the light coming through. If it works, I won't even need Koehler illumination equipment."

"Why not an electron microscope?"

"Because the CDCs had those. If I'm going to outdo them, I probably don't need to use the exact same things they had access to. They likely already did all that could be done with them."

"Possibly. Why amber from different epochs? Shouldn't it have the same diffraction properties?"

"Oh, God, no. The difference in background radiation as it formed would alter its distortion qualities. Go ahead and bring the ones with bugs inside for comparison. I'll use the Geiger counter on them as an extra check. I want tapered fiber optic cable most of all."

"Why?"

"I can only think of one major reason why none of the pros at the CDC would have found what I can hope to find. That would be some sort of fragility to the phenomenon. We don't have time to develop brand new chemical agents to do the work with, so I'm going to have to try another form of microscopy. I need to add two things to the request list."

"Those being?"

"GFP. It's a fluorescent protein, good for certain kinds of microscopy. I've no idea how to find it. Then I'll need access to the gym. When I have this thing ready to test, I'm going to need to test it on dead that are walking. Hence the micromanipulators and fiber optic cable."

"You want to push the microscope INSIDE the dead and look at them while they're still moving!"

"And feed the data into a computer so I can get a good look through a digital camera. They called them micrographs. We'll be attempting 'videonanography.' What can you give me today?"

"Most of the electronic gear. Tomorrow I can manage some jewelry equipment and two crash helmets. Wilson will have access to a drill press downstairs and a few hand tools, but I've specifically told him not to bring them to you. The drill press is too bulky to bring up here anyway. I'll be going out tomorrow night for more. That's Vicodin and more Jolly Ranchers. You have some sketches for me?"

House pointed to another table. The masked man walked over to a stack of small, flattened boxes and turned them over. He cocked his head at the sketches. "A merry-go-round?"

"Not so merry. Like a 'dirge-go-round' or a carousel du mort. No calliope music on this one."

The masked man shook his head. "That would lurch pretty badly."

"I'm suggesting we physically cut the tall ones down if necessary to make their strides the same. After a while, they generally pace each other anyway, right?"

The masked man shook his head again. "I'll be gone longer than planned. I'll have to leave Wilson in charge of rationing food and water. Four to five days, leaving tomorrow. Wilson will be along later with today's items." He placed a small bottle on a table, turned, leapt for the rope, climbed hand over hand out of sight, and locked a panel in place over the hole he left through.

House looked at the bottle. "Rum flavoring? Huh. So this is what Ann Gee feels like when she's paid." Stifling a smile, he turned back to the whiteboard.

Hmm. Yeah, he's up to SOMETHING. Please read and review. If you're interested in the background sciences, SCID is real and has a Navajo type, the physics and microscopy problems I've mentioned are real, and the GFP and equipment and terms are real, except the one House 'made up.' Naturally not everything House said is perfectly true . . .