Second Sight by George D Shuman Read Free Book Online Page B

and Kimble had a heavily padded safeguard against risk, even in an unstable economy. They had the United States government’s largest black-budget grant to a private company in all history, and they had maintained it exclusively and secretly for the past fifty years.
    The entity was DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The ultrasecret project was MIRA, which until 2008 was the linchpin of American weaponry. So advanced was MIRA’s artificial intelligence that MIRA could have application in nearly every aspect of war and war machines.
    Except that suddenly the newly elected president wasn’t behind the defense department administration’s spending, talking about cuts so deep they might even excise ongoing MIRA development, and that was something Edward Case had never anticipated. More than thirty-eight billion dollars’ worth of research over the last twenty years was about to be shelved.
    To an outsider it would appear that pharmaceutical companies could afford to take risks, since the profits in prescription medications alone were simply staggering. But no one stuck his neck out like Edward Case in speculation research, and no one had the nerve to question the company’s surviving founder until the board of directors learned about the White House position on defense spending. Now at risk of losing their seven-figure bonuses, they wanted to know on record why he had been pushing so much of the company’s holdings into research on MIRA. They wanted it noted that the company was already teetering on the FDA’s approval of Alixador, which had passed its own billion-dollar mark in genetic research last year. The board wanted it made clear to stockholders that they were only following the lead of their founder, and that perhaps they had been misled themselves concerning future approvals.
    No one ever knew what some jury might decide about how death or impairment was related to one of their prescription medications. Subjective though it was, major awards and ripples of consumer anxiety were enough to rock a company, even one the size of Case and Kimble. And C&K’s legal bills were anything but incidental. Edward Case had always insisted that the organization send a message that Case and Kimble wasn’t an easy target for every law school graduate who managed to add Esquire to their name.
    Now a dozen competitors had eclipsed the wonder drug Sentinal, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was calling for a review of its progeny, Xendoral, which had been implicated in dozens of suicides in the last two years.
    C&K’s stocks were on the decline in a deplorable economy, and CEO Ed Case was getting vibes from his board of directors that they wanted a public audit. They were worried about their own asses, of course, worried and feigning disapproval of his own sixty-two-million-dollar annual bonus in a recession with an unemployment rate rising over eight percent.
    They wouldn’t have said a word about it had the Democrats not taken over the White House. They wouldn’t have dared to raise a hand when everyone’s good fortune was riding on the wings of national security. The military’s interest had long been piqued by Case’s mind-control research, and indeed they had used it in the field with a high degree of effectiveness. But secret defense department funding would no longer escape scrutiny in a Democrat-controlled Senate, and Case’s new renderings of microwave delivery systems could be first on the list of cuts.
    Thank God for Alixador, he thought. Case knew what impact Alixador would have on Case and Kimble’s bottom line next year. Alixador was going to be the biggest thing to hit the market since aspirin, and all it required was the FDA’s approval.
    A phenomenon of cellular research, Alixador was designed to trick the brain into believing the stomach was full. Alixador, touting well-established trials of men and women under sixty, boasted a seventy percent success rate in non-narcotic weight