Phillip E Temples

Uncontacted Frontier - Carrie Bloomfield Phillip E Temples

Carrie Bloomfield receives an email after nearly thirty years from Francois Boucher, M. D., formerly of Doctors Without Borders. A former love interest of Carrie's, Boucher now works in the for-profit sector and is responsible for new drug discoveries with a large multinational conglomerate, Aprone-Fischer Corporation. Boucher wants to organize an expedition to the Amazon basin in Brazil to harvest biota and needs Carrie's experience in translational medicine. More importantly, he desires the credibility of her non-profit foundation to secure approval from the Brazilian government to enter the Uncontacted Frontier, home to indigenous, uncontacted tribes.

Bloomfield soon discovers Boucher's proposed expedition isn't what he represents it to be. In reality, it's a front to allow Aprone-Fischer access to the land in order to explore for large deposits of palladium, a rare metal that's more valuable than gold. The corporation intends to rid the land of the indigenous peoples by placing items in the rainforest contaminated with a strain of the measles for them to discover. Carrie Bloomfield must help the tribe survive this plague for which they have no immunity, and expose the truth about the company's scheme.

Carrie quickly hurried away and headed to the unmarked tent. She saw no one in the vicinity, nor was a guard posted. It was now or never. She seized the opportunity and entered.

At first, Carrie was puzzled by the various scientific instruments in the room. But she did recognize one item--a spectrometer. The nomenclature on the front panel indicated it was a portable arc/spark mobile metal analyzer. Next to it she saw several silvery metallic rock samples laid out on the table next to a laptop computer. The screensaver displayed the stylized block letters "A-F" circling a globe in green. She walked over to the computer and hit the space bar and was rewarded immediately with a Mac OS computer screen. Carrie grabbed a USB stick lying on the table, plugged it in, then clicked on the Finder program and began copying all of the files from the "Documents" directory onto the stick--periodically glancing over her shoulder at the tent opening. If someone walked in now, she'd have no idea how to explain her actions.

Carrie silently willed the animated file icons on the screen to move faster. Several dozen documents and Excel spreadsheets in the directory were already copied. One alphanumeric string in the file names consistently popped out at her: "Pd46." Carrie knew it represented the chemical element Palladium, atomic number 46. Palladium was a key component in fuel cells, as well as in all types of electronic devices--especially smartphones. It was more valuable than gold.

The file copying was finally complete. Carrie yanked the stick out of the laptop and put it in her pocket. She started to stand up and leave just when--

WHACK!

Something hard and metallic smacked her in the back of the head. She saw stars, then she lost consciousness.