Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A Novel of Suspense
By Alvin Ziegler
GRIDLOCK/Alvin Ziegler 2
Alvin Ziegler
alvinziegler@gmail.com
© 2010 Alvin Ziegler
GRIDLOCK/Alvin Ziegler 3
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GRIDLOCK/Alvin Ziegler 4
Facts
one
Friday, October 28
Meyrin, Switzerland
two
Friday, October 28
San Francisco, CA
Aiming his car key button at his Mazda, Jude locked the MX6
on steep Hyde Street. He had found a spot without circling on
crammed Russian Hill. Just what he needed after bourbon
rounds.
He drifted by a family of five parading from an ice cream
parlor. The store manager followed them out, flipping a
closed sign on the glass door. Their trip for dessert looked like
a nine o’clock ritual. The kids goofed on their father when his
scoop landed on the pavement.
Jude’s footsteps slowed when a hazy childhood memory
circled from years back. Jude’s mother used to carpool him
and his friends from Little League baseball games to the
Baskin Robbins Ice Cream after the ninth inning. She would
buy a hot-fudge sundae for any batter who got on base. She
would’ve been proud of how Jude was working to improve
medicine at Stanford. It was his way of rewriting his
childhood history. He shook off the memories. Such brooding
snuck up on him while he lived alone.
Coming to his rented ground-floor flat, he picked up the
New York Times electric blue plastic bag. He carried it
through the front gate to the Mediterranean-styled three-story
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three
Friday, October 28
Meyrin, Switzerland
The results would come back on two DVDs to the patient and
his doctor. That doctor could then log onto Stanford’s secured
website to access the Grid. The Grid would compare the
genomic data from those DVDs against millions of other
online medical records, isolating tissue samples from patients
with similar symptoms or disease. The result: a customized
treatment for your individual illness.
When you combine the Grid that crunches massive
amounts of data with the U.S. Government’s National Cancer
Institute grid which is called caBIG—the cancer Biomedical
Informatics Grid, well, you end up with a very powerful
thing.”
The audience had gone dead silent.
“Can you back up? Where do those patient records come
from?” asked a man with a Scottish accent.
“Good question. For years, medical researchers struggled
with doing statistical analysis. Hospitals, doctor’s offices and
pharmacies used disparate computer systems. Thus,
networks couldn’t communicate, making medical records
inaccessible. Vital information that could save lives was
wasted.
Finally, research hospitals teamed up with everyone
possible to get the data online. The solution started with
creating systems of security that topped that of the ATM
business. Of course, even putting anonymous medical
information online was controversial. Everyone feared the
upshot of a privacy breach. But the need to save lives won the
war over privacy fears. Computer standards were created and
information pooled. Mind you, all names, social security
numbers and hospital account numbers remained
anonymous. While this was happening, the search engines of
the world connected that pooled information to create an
even larger dataset.”
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four
Friday, October 28
San Francisco, CA
A patrol car’s P.A. chirp signaled cars to move out of the way.
The attackers let go of Jude as the black-and-white whipped
around the corner and stopped. In seconds, the man and
woman ran to the Rover and screeched away.
“On your feet,” came from a voice above.
Flat on his back, Jude thought he was on an operating
table. That vision changed when his eyes rolled open to a
bystander and two cops. Three heads silhouetted against the
night sky. One cop gave a repulsed expression at Jude’s
alcohol breath. One strike against him.
“I’m with the FBI,” Jude choked to the mustached officer.
No response. Two cardboard cutouts of men would’ve
been more animated. After Jude got on his feet, he showed
the officer his wallet and badge. The bystander vanished into
the dark.
“Stand back,” the officer said. Jude understood that many
cops had been treated dismissively by a feeb at some point on
duty. That could’ve been the case here. Also, feds were
famous for padding their arrest reports with busts made by
beat officers. It didn’t help matters. They collaborated like
political rivals.
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After locking the door behind the cops, Jude blew debris
from the hard drive with a can of compressed air and slid it
into the drive bay. Then he navigated to drive F to check for
damage. With relief, he saw the files. The pounding in his
chest slowed, but he couldn’t forget that whoever instigated
this had dangerous ideas and an elaborate plan of operation.
He went to the kitchen, pulled a bag out of the freezer and
rubbed Birds Eye frozen corn on his still raw, throbbing
cheek. Moving to the bathroom mirror, he stared at scrapes
from road burn that textured one side of his face.
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