We Can Rebuild Them, We Have The Technology

WE CAN REBUILD THEM, WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY

“Ya know, Jamie, I’m not sure that this is right the job for you.” Steve looked at Jamie, the love of his life, and waited for her acquiescence. Like she usually did. After all, he was Steve Austin, astronaut, test pilot, secret agent, bionic man.

Jamie looked at him, the smile gone from her lips.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

Steve shrugged. “I think that maybe I’m the best man for this assignment. No offence, but you’re a woman, and this is pretty dangerous stuff.”

Max, Jamie’s very special German Shepherd, emitted a low growl, his hackles rising. Jamie gently touched his head.

“It’s okay,” she murmured.  

Max quieted, but his gaze never left Steve.

“Steve, you know that I can do everything you can do, right?”

“I’m not sure that’s true Jamie. After all, I’m a trained professional, and I used to be an astronaut.”

Jamie crossed her arms across her chest.

“Unless this mission is on the moon, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count.”

Steve smiled at Jamie. “My training includes crisis situation training.”

Jamie gave a snort. “Steve, I teach. High school. There is nothing that I am not prepared for.”

Steve gave a small nod. She might be right. The one time that he had gone into Jamie’s classroom for career day — he went as an astronaut, not a spy — it had been pretty rough. They stared at him with their collective bored, dead eyes. He felt that he was looking at the children of the corn. He felt seriously outnumbered. But Jamie managed to wrangle them, and keep them in check, and awake. She even got them to ask a few questions. But he was very much relieved when the class was over, and he was safely back in his car in the parking lot. Then there had been a gun scare a couple of months ago, and Jamie had single-handedly averted a disaster because she heard the perps talking about it, and was able to contact the authorities before it all went to hell. The kids still didn’t know how she knew, but that was the beauty of bionic hearing — no one knew.

“Granted,” said Steve, “but this mission is still dangerous. These are really bad guys. Oscar thinks I should infiltrate the gang.”

Jamie looked at Steve. She could always tell when he was lying because Steve’s bionic eye never dilated quite as much as his regular eye. Right now, right eye dilated, left eye, not so much. He was lying.

Oscar was Oscar Goldman, their boss at OSI, the Office of Scientific Intelligence. He was their “spy boss,” and oversaw all of their missions. If someone had asked Oscar who was the better bionic spy he would have been torn to choose one over the other. Knowing that Steve’s biggest problem was his ego, he tended to try and send them on missions together due to Jamie’s ability to keep Steve and his giant head tethered in reality. Plus, Jamie had Max, a definite plus. But not all bad guys respected women, which put Jamie at a disadvantage. So, sending them in together was always his first choice. But the nature of this job was such that only one of them would be able to infiltrate the organization. 

“I bet Oscar either said that we figure it out ourselves, or that I should go.”

It was Steve’s turn to cross his arms over his chest. He looked away, out across the trail they were hiking. He scanned the vista out of habit, knowing the value of bionic sight. All was right in nature. Not so much where they were.

“Whatever,” Steve whispered himself.

“I can hear that, you know.”

Steve knew that Jamie could hear everything. Everything. It was almost like she could read his mind.

“Look,” said Steve, not making eye contact. “I don’t think that they’ll buy you as an eco-terrorist. You’re just too … too nice.

“Steve,” said Jamie, using her patient voice, the one she used when trying to convince recalcitrant students of the benefits of doing their school work. “I’m from California, and everybody knows that we are all left-leaning, granola crunching hippies at heart. Activist to terrorist is a pretty small step.”

“But I’m from California, too, so doesn’t that mean that I should have the job?”

Jamie shook her head. “Steve, you are military.”

It was Steve’s turn to shake his head. “Lots of military become disenfranchised, and join right-wing groups. Plus, I have a degrees in science and engineering. I actually know how to make a bomb.”

Jamie had to admit that was a plus. But she wasn’t ready to give up.

“I teach chemistry. I can learn. Plus I have Max.”

Steve looked down at Max, her fine looking canine. He was still looking at Steve, not as menacingly as before, but still, they were not friends right at that moment.

Even though they lived in the same house, Max was, without a

doubt, Jamie’s dog. Max had been a young puppy when he had been caught in a lab fire, and nearly died. Because the lab was part of OSI, Oscar Goldman felt that Max was a perfect fit for the newest bionic retrofit. He was fitted with four bionic legs and a bionic jaw. Max was at the lab during the same time that Jamie was, and the two had bonded, creating a new partnership. Steve knew that Max would die trying to save Jamie. But that didn’t mean that the two of them were better than he was. He was, after all Steve Austin. He'd had his own Wheaties box.

“Look, Jamie, I’m not saying that you and Max aren’t really good together, but I think that this mission should be mine. I can act the disgruntled vet. I know people, who know people, who can put out the word that I’m looking for like-minded eco terrorists. Don’t I look like the kind of guy who would happily blow up a pipeline?”

Jamie snorted again. “No, Steve, you look like the guy who’d happily arrest the guys who tried to blow up the pipeline."

Jamie loved Steve. They were a couple, and had been married for seven years.  It wasn’t always easy, but it worked. They knew each other’s secrets. Today, though, that knowledge wasn’t helping either of them.

“I can get into the group. I have arrests for civil disobedience,” countered Jamie.

It was true. She had been arrested twice. Once, when she climbed up a tree in an old growth forest and refused to come down for fourteen days. The second time when she’d chained herself for an ancient sequoia.  

“True, but you were what, eleven? And your parents were arrested with you, unless I’m mistaken.”

Jamie had to concede that her sketchy background was ancient history, almost as ancient as the sequoia she’d chained herself to.

In the end the two of them decided to both try to get recruited by the group on their own. The first one in would get the mission.

Steve tried disgruntled vet. He started hanging out a meetings, and around the area where the group was known to frequent. He’d been mouthing off about big oil, and how the oil cartels were as bad as the drug cartels. He even got into a fight with a logger. He was pretty sure that the suspects were getting close to approaching him, until one of the guys looked at him closely.

“Hey! Aren’t you that astronaut guy? The one who spent like a year on the ISS?”

Busted.

Meanwhile, Jamie started hanging out at a dive bar that the group frequented. She even got a job bartending. But the only notice she got was the unwanted kind, and she ended up not getting invited into the group, but making a killing in tips.

But she had a backup plan — Max.

She knew where the group’s compound was. She sent him in, limping (he was a very smart dog).

Jamie watched as Max whined and limped up to the guard on duty at the gate.

“Hey buddy, what happened to you?” asked the guard.

Max whined on cue. The guard bent to take a look at his paw.

Jamie came running down the road, all disheveled.

“Help us. Please. We’ve been in a car accident. Max here needs help. Please.”

She swooned, and looked like she was going to faint. The guard took pity on the hurt dog, and the pretty lady, and took them into the compound. He had recognized Jamie from the bar, and he liked her.  He hoped that she'd be willing to show him how thankful she was for his help.

Once they were inside the compound, Jamie was able to hear conversations, and note the layout. Max was able to record everything with the tiny camera attached to his collar.

The plot was foiled, and the gang arrested.

A few days after the close of the case, Jamie and Steve were walking Max in the forest surrounding their home.

“Steve, you have to let me do my job. It may be dangerous, and it may be hard, but I’m as good an agent as you are. We are both amazing, and we both have our own set of specialized skills.”

Steve remained silent. He had been on the road, in the brush, when Jamie and Max had entered the compound, and he had worried that something had gone wrong. Instead, they had succeeded, spectacularly.

Jamie and Max had executed their mission flawlessly, with Jamie only having to disarm three men, and Max only having to bite two.

Steve should have admitted that Jamie was right. She had used her brain, and had done a fantastic job. But he couldn’t. He was Steve Austin, astronaut, test pilot, secret agent, bionic man. He should be the best agent. Jamie, while fantastic, wasn’t him. She was a school teacher, for God’s sake. Sure she was bionic, but was she as bionic as he was? He didn’t think so. He didn’t think that bionics made up for the differences in gender. Men would always be stronger, faster, braver than women.

And face it, Max was a dog — a bionic dog, but still, just a dog. How dependable was he, anyways?

“I’m not sure that we are as equally matched as you think we are. I’m sorry, Jamie, but I think that I’m the better cyborg.”

She was stunned. They’d been together so long, and had been through so much together. Why was she only finding out now that her bionic man was a sexist bionic man.

“Okay, macho man, let’s do this, once and for all,” she challenged.

They contacted Oscar, and even though he was against the head-to-head competition, they set it up at OSI headquarters. This was the first time that they would be competing against each other, and he and Dr. Wells were very interested in the outcomes.

The running competition was close, but Jamie was faster. She could run almost as fast as Max, at 86 mph. Steve was slower at 78 mph. Jamie could jump vertically fifteen feet, Steve fourteen. Jamie and Steve could both jump from the top of the OSI headquarters’ roof, so it was a tie. Stamina was in Steve’s favour, but not by much. He could run at sixty miles per hour for four hours, fifteen minutes, Jamie, four hours, seven minutes.  

Both had equal strength in their bionic arms, but because Jamie’s was her dominant hand, she had the benefit of added dexterity, so she inched out Steve, winning the arm comparison.

But now was the time to compare apples to oranges. Jamie’s bionic hearing to Steve’s bionic eye.

Steve was worlds ahead in vision, being able to clearly see farther than most binoculars. He also had the added benefit of infrared capabilities. Jamie, on the other hand, could hear at epic distances, and had the added benefit of being able to translate over twenty languages, and identify the source of an encyclopedia of sounds.

How to compare their different abilities? Oscar decided on a simple game of tag. The first person to sneak up on the other without being caught would be the winner.  

It was a dark night when the contest began. Steve spotted Jamie twice, and she had to flee. But Jamie was able to stalk Steve for over two miles before she heard him stop and turn around, sensing her presence. Jamie believed that Steve had the advantage with his infrared sight, but she was determined to show him that she was as good an operative as he was, with or without his night sight.  

Steve also believed that his vision would be the feature that won him the competition. It was his number-one advantage. It had allowed him to spot her twice. It was only a matter of time before he was able to track her down and sneak up on her.  

But Jamie had different plans. Because she knew that his infrared sight made her glow, she had to figure a way to solve this problem.  She zipped up her jacket, tightened her hoodie around her head — both to reduce her heat signature — and stood stalk still listening for Steve. She heard him a mile or so to the east. He was travelling in a north-east direction, towards her.

Good.

Jamie found the largest tree in the immediate forest, jumped up to the tallest branch, about fifteen feet, climbed up to twenty-five feet, and waited.

Steve was so sure that his infrared capabilities would be his winning ticket, that he forgot to take into account Jamie’s extraordinary abilities, and while not crashing through the forest, he wasn’t practicing stealthy travel. Jamie literally heard him a mile away.

Steve entered the immediate area around Jamie’s hiding spot. As he got closer, she quietly circled the tree, keeping the massive trunk between her and Steve so that he couldn’t read her heat signature. She needn’t have worried, because Steve never looked up, focussing instead on everything at eye level, and below.

As he walked by, Jamie jumped lightly from the tree, grabbed Steve’s shoulder from behind, and yelled, “Gotcha!”

Steve startled badly, and instinctively, twisted around to strike out with his bionic arm. Jamie anticipating Steve’s move rocketed backwards eight feet, completely out of Steve’s range.

“What the hell, Jamie! You scared the crap out of me!”

“True, but I still win.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Not fair? How is me hiding from you and your super cool eyeball not fair?”

“You hid in the tree. Not fair.”

“It is not my fault that you don’t look up.”

“Still not fair.”

They walked back in silence, finding Oscar in the OSI building. He looked at his watch as Steve and Jamie walked into the office.

“An hour and twenty minutes. Much faster than I thought.” He looked from Jamie to Steve. “Who won?”

Steve shook his head, disgust written over his face. “Jamie.”

Oscar chose to ignore Steve’s pouty face. Instead he smiled at Jamie. “Congratulations, Jamie. You, then are the better bionic spy.”

“It’s not fair,” whined Steve. “She knew my strengths and abilities, and played them against me.”

Oscar looked confused. “Yes. This was a head-to-head competition. You both knew each other’s skills, and had to find a way to negate them, while using your own abilities to catch the other.”

Steve shook his head. “No. Not fair. People that we would be tracking wouldn’t know our advance skills, and I’m sure I would be able to capture any one before Jamie could.”

Oscar said nothing. Jamie said nothing. Steve continued, not looking at Jamie.

“She’s a girl, a teacher, who’s claim-to-fame is being able to play tennis. I’m an elite army trained operative. She must have cheated. There’s no way she—” he hiked his thumb in Jamie’s direction, “could best me.”

Oscar was beginning to look concerned. Steve’s ego was so fragile that he couldn’t accept his defeat.

Jamie spoke up, she voice deathly quiet. “I’m right here Steve. Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room. And I didn’t cheat. I can’t believe that you’re accusing me of not playing fair. I would never cheat. You know that.”

“You must have. I should not have lost to you.”

“And yet you did." She paused. "Maybe, just maybe, I’m as good as you. Or, heaven forbid, better.” She paused again, anger painting her face. “I used my brain. You didn’t. You let your ego get the better of you. In the field that could get you or me killed.” She paused for a third time. “I’m so disappointed in you, Steve. I think we may have to re-evaluate our relationship.”

At that she turned and walked away. Steve and Oscar watched her leave.  

Steve turned to Oscar, and whispered, “She cheated, Oscar, she had to have. No way she could beat me.”

“I heard that!” Jamie yelled from the far end of the field.

Without turning around, she held up her hand, extending the middle finger while continuing to walk away.

“I saw that!” yelled Steve.

“You were supposed to!” yelled back Jamie.