Death Ray Butterfly

Chapter Eleven

We had some pretty fancy operations going on back in the day, especially in the "War on Stuff". We called it the War on Stuff because the stuff was always changing. At one time or another, pretty much every kind of substance you could absorb was declared war on, whether it was prescribed by a doctor or not. We were used to constantly revising the list of stuff, which we also called "the goods". If somebody had the goods, that was too bad for them!

Law enforcement went to extremes when it came to the stuff. We had machines, we had tests, we had animals, you name it, we had it. One of the geniuses in that last department was a woman named Kiki Photescu. She'd come from Romania where she had a history of amazingly bad luck. She was originally a circus freak, able to twist herself like a pretzel. They said she could dislocate every single bone in her body at the same time, and pop them all right back into place on cue. Somewhere along the line she picked up some animal training, beginning with cats, if I remember right. She would have these cats distribute themselves randomly in the audience, then they'd all leap out and started yowling at the same time, scaring the crap out of everybody in the building. Some people got scratched, and Kiki got canned.

Now on her own, she moved on to birds - mourning doves, another unfortunate choice, because these birds were able to sniff out death. She'd let them go and off they'd fly through the city, coming to roost within a few feet of where a murder was about to be committed. The cops took to following the birds, and that actually saved a few lives, I think, but then the birds got specialized, and started to forecast "official" killings. The secret police were not too thrilled. Kiki had to choose between emigration or else.

She ended up here in the great southwest where she worked for a while on a rescue ranch, the kind of place where all the zoo animals get shipped off to once they're no longer useful. They also had some mountain lions relocated from La Honda, California, and some other exotic creatures too wily for mankind. This place was also used for some experimental purposes, and Ms. Photescu was welcomed into that little fraternity there, and got involved in the War on Stuff.

We always had drug-sniffing dogs. Everybody knows that dogs are good for pretty much anything. They're smart, they train up well, stay under control, and people like them. Other creatures get tried out from time to time, but usually you end up with dogs. Kiki was never a dog person. Cats were pretty much useless - she knew that - and she'd become a bit superstitious about birds after her dove adventure. She moved right on to insects. No one's ever been sure how she did it, but she ended up breeding and developing a number of species of curiously adaptive insects. I remember reading about some of them; the roaches that could track down methamphetamine and swarm the labs by the millions, the bees that could sniff out corn syrup, and the ants that marched directly to patchouli oil fields.

What got her into trouble this time - and not just her - were the butterflies. In some ways they were her crowning achievement, those huge yellow and black monarchs she called Fonticiads. Crazy as it sounds, these overgrown caterpillars had a special sense for prides of unstable dibaryons. Kiki Photescu had somehow anticipated the coming Stuff list, and there she was, all ready with the tools when subatomics made it. The feds paid a hefty price for her services; after all, they had generated this new panic and needed something showy to highlight their efforts against it, and these masses of gigantic Fonticiads were just the thing - photogenic, larger than life, and unerringly accurate.

The day she brought them here to Spring Hill Lake is the day that everything changed. She kept them in special baskets, a whole pickup load of them; must have been a hundred thousand or more all packed together in the back of that old black Chevy truck. Federal agents had their suspicions, but mostly they just moved from town to town, putting on a show. They'd plant some dibaryons in a building somewhere, let the butterflies loose and sure enough, they'd show up right on time for the six o'clock news. Nobody ever said what the problem was with those particles - research even showed them to be harmless, even hypothetical - but that was not the issue. Getting the public on board was key. There was always some new fright cropping up that needed calming and soothing. The feds liked to get some local involvement too, so there I was, part of their bug and pony show.

This time there apparently weren't enough of the decoy particles to attract the interest of the insects. Nope. They flew straight off in a different direction, headed right down to the waterfront where they surrounded an old abandoned storage warehouse by the railroad yards. Nobody could have guessed that Arab "Cricket" Jones had a thing about butterflies, a pet peeve, if you will, about that old saying about a butterfly flapping its wings in China and causing a hurricane in the Atlantic. Well, those butterflies were flapping their wings all right, but not in China. They were flapping them right where Jones and his crew were busy packing up crates of very illegal and very unstable subatomics. It was showtime.