Alchemy of Glass

by Barbara Barnett

  First, a cup of tea.

  The dream refused to dissipate, even as Anne found her way down to the kitchen and put up the kettle. Instead, it reprised in disparate afterimages randomly stimulating her retinas—spectral figments, like she’d stared too long at a camera’s flash.

  She sighed, inhaling the fragrant citrus spice of the tea as it steeped, adding a splash of cream and one sugar cube. Finally, sinking into the deep cushions of the library sofa, she opened her laptop and clicked on the first pdf image of Erin Alcott’s genome.

  What the fuck is that? Anne drew the computer closer, refusing to believe what her own eyes told her. She opened another. The same thing. And then the third. Each scan, right across the middle, had imprinted identical patterns of small dots. They almost seemed to be pinholes of light. Whatever they were, they obscured the central image, but Anne was more concerned with the telomere region, which was clear as it needed to be for interpretation. Thank God for small favors, at least.

  Still, they needed to be redone. Anne had no deep desire to delay things by even an hour, much less the time it would take to rerun the sample through the electron microscope.

  What the bloody hell was that bizarre pattern, and how the devil had it . . . ? A defect in the microscope? Impurities in the substrate? Or the preparation of the sample, or a million other things that might have gone awry before the image had been made. Yes, she’d used an experimental microscope, hybrid open-air scanning electron and light, but there was no way for another object to project, even with the unconventional protocol she’d used.

  She opened the image in a different computer application and clicked on “enhance image,” so she could gain a closer, more detailed view of the offending object. She printed out the three images and held them beneath a light.

  There were minor differences. Not in the genome—that was stable in each. The telomeres were clear, at least, if damning in their confirmation of Erin’s GPC. But what was it with the artifact—or whatever it was? In each image, their relative position had changed, as if they’d moved—somehow.

  The small points radiated into a spiral from a fuzzy, indistinct nucleus, like cytochrome-C protein structures during cell death. Something tied to Erin’s GPC? It would make no sense; she’d never heard of a connection, and the structures did not appear to be part of the image itself, but imposed from an altogether different source.

  She glanced down, noticing the glint of her necklace, shimmering in the bright incandescence of the table lamp. The light reflected off the gemstones’ facets, projecting a spray of tiny dots onto the sofa, and the nearest wall. The same configuration, more or less. Slightly different coloration, but also a spiral pattern. Coincidence? Random chance?

  Highly likely. But how could the necklace be the culprit? The electron microscope would have so magnified the stones they would have obscured the entire image—and then some. The scale in no way matched reality. Anne unlatched the delicate gold chain, and the necklace fell into her cupped hand.

  The ouroboros book had been returned to the fae, or so Gaelan had told her, and in its place had been left this lovely, but not-so-unusual, necklace. Not anything unique about it; she’d seen pendants of its like in Harrods, in online jewelry shops—semiprecious gems set into a circular labyrinth. She recognized peridot, garnet, aquamarine, others as well. For all she knew, they were colorful zircons. Or glass.

  And . . . there was nothing in the stones to suggest even remotely what she’d seen projected onto the scan. She looked closer, shining her phone’s flashlight directly on the pattern.

  Drawing the desk lamp near, she studied the variation of the randomly placed stones as they framed the circular labyrinth. Thirty-six stones formed the spokes of the maze. Delicate gold filigree, fine as silk thread, formed spokes that joined the spiral together at varying distances. In the center sparkled a single clear crystal, its seemingly infinite facets rendering it far from colorless. The LED light caught the depth and edges of each plane, crossing and diffracting into pink, orange, yellow, and deep sapphire blue, but changing, second by second, and with the angle of the light.

  The labyrinth grew out from the center in both spokes and a continuous spiral outward. One deep blue stone followed, seeming nearly black from afar and in juxtaposition to the clarity and brilliance of the central stone. Then a solitary ruby—or garnet—that seemed to draw color as well from the blue stone, rendering it a garish electric purple.

  The gems danced, alive and constantly changing in the light, more brilliant than the mere showy sparkle of a diamond in a jewelry shop showcase. Two tiny opals blazed beside the ruby, their inner fire astonishing for their tiny size, followed by a series of three peridots, which lent their pastel green to the opals to at once cool the fire.

  The next in the series was light blue quartz. Aquamarine? Five stones. Anne’s eyes began to sting from her close scrutiny of the necklace. There were two remaining sets, one of eight yellow-hued stones and thirteen of amethyst. All very well. All quite beautiful. Yet the central question remained. How could a projection from the labyrinth, radiating facets or not, have created a spray of microscopic dots on the micrograph? It was a giant leap to think it an even remote possibility.

  What would the stones look like under an electron microscope? An expensive experiment for a mega-giant “what if?” Of course, she’d have to arrange for the time—and charge it to the project. And then explain it to Alcott. Fuck. No; it was none of his damn business. Maybe Dana Spangler had access to an EM she might use away from Alcott’s enquiring eyes.

  She would ring her up first thing.

  CHAPTER 30

  “There. Do you see it?” Anne directed Dana’s gaze to the computer screen in Dana’s lab.

  “What? What are we looking at? This is obviously not your patient’s chromosome. Not a chromosome at all. Even I, a lowly postdoc, know that.”

  “Obviously. And there it is again.”

  “What?” Dana repeated, more insistently. “I don’t—”

  “Movement.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “A gem. An amethyst to be exact.”

  “Okay. Can you tell me why the hell we are looking at an amethyst in my $2.7 million machine?”

  “Curiosity?”

  “Anne—”

  “Okay, so it’s more than curiosity. I can’t tell you, not yet anyway, because I’m not sure myself.”

  Dana scrunched closer to the video screen, pointing to a tentaclelike structure. “It looks like a phage. Maybe.”

  “That’s not possible. It’s a stone. You know, an inanimate object, meaning not bloody alive? You think something’s caught in it, like a mosquito in amber?”

  “Yeah, but a mosquito in amber doesn’t move. Oh!” The phage jumped and Dana leapt back from the video screen.

  “Yeah. That.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  Anne pushed back from the video screen. “Well . . . ?”

  “Where exactly did you get this stone of yours? I’m guessing not rock collecting at Oak Street beach.”

  Anne removed her necklace, placing it in Dana’s hand.

  “That’s from your necklace? I don’t—”

  “Neither do I. My patient’s genetic scans came back from the lab with really weird artifacts—a pattern. Dots of light.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Hang on. That’s what I thought, too. Then I noticed the diffraction pattern given off by my necklace under an LED light—and there it was. The same patterning.” Anne pointed to one of the amethysts in her necklace. “What we just saw? A vid capture of that stone. Courtesy of your brilliant EM.”

  “So you’re saying that the artifact . . . but the scale doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yeah. There is that. Well, I guess I’m not going to wear it to work from now on.” Anne wanted to change the subject. “We’re having lunch later, right? That new little fish shack near Navy Pier?” Nice try.

  “Sure. But aren’t you
curious? Where did you get it? You never noticed it before?”

  Of course, she was curious. “It’s new. Only had it a couple weeks. A gift.”

  Anne watched Dana do the math.

  “From Gaelan.”

  Anne nodded. “I mean, yeah, he’s a bit of a strange . . .” She could not go there. “I’m not sure where he got it . . . I mean he deals . . . dealt in all sorts of odd . . . antiquities, was it?”

  “Yeah.” Dana opened her phone. “Shit. I’ve gotta get back to it, Anne. I’m presenting at group tomorrow afternoon and—”

  “Oh, how I not-so-fondly remember those days. See you in an hour, eh?”

  Curious as Anne was, it would have to wait. Preston Alcott’s text message said he’d sent over a “present,” which was awaiting her in the laboratory refrigerator. From a scientist friend of his, he said, working on novel gene therapies.

  “I don’t know if it will help you, but the guy is Erin’s godfather—a good friend of my wife’s from college,” he explained in a follow-up email. “He’s a basic researcher. Not a doctor. Figured it was worth a look. He mentioned something he called super-enhanced hepatic TERT—SEP TERT? He said you’d understand. I sure as hell don’t. A cell line he’s developing, he says.”

  What the fuck was “super” enhanced TERT? Liver. Telomerase reverse transcriptase. Yes, it was worth a look. TERT was organ-specific. Erin’s condition wasn’t organ-specific—it was . . . everywhere.

  She’d never seen research on treating GPC with TERT, human or otherwise. And nothing about a “super” enhanced anything of the sort. Yes, it was the activating ingredient in immortalizing a telomere, but . . .

  She emailed Alcott for the name of the researcher in case she had any questions. She knew most of the researchers in the field, and would know him by name, if nothing else.

  Back in her own lab, Anne prepped the “gift”—a sample of hepatic tissue—to examine the telomeres at the subcellular level and placed it in the scope. She poured a coffee and sat down at the video screen, dropping her cup when she looked up at the display. What the fuck . . . ?

  “Improbable.” “Unlikely.” “Coincidence.” None of these sufficed for what her mind tried its best to reject as completely impossible. But there it was. Again, on the video image, not an artifact on a scan, not the image of whatever was encased in her necklace’s gemstones, but now in the tissue sample Alcott had provided her courtesy of his researcher friend. It wasn’t similar; it was the exact phenomenon she’d observed, yet on a completely different scale.

  Small specks of light scattered all along the telomere loop. Not ordered, like in her necklace, but exhibiting the same radiance, this time in scale with the rest of the scan. The dots were bound up in the genome, but only at the telomere segment. What the fuck is this?

  Professional skepticism had always been one of Anne’s most useful skills—trained into her as an Oxford first-year, and throughout her schooling. The best fallback position whenever anything seemed too coincidental. If it’s too good to be true, it is.

  Coincidences are not, and if they seem to be, it’s because you haven’t done your homework. Or forgot to drop your bias at the lab door. “Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous,” Einstein said. Anne didn’t know if she believed in God, whatever that meant, but if he—or she—wanted to play anonymously amongst the human folk, it was a bloody good way.

  The miracle of a breakthrough when least expecting it. Stage four cancer that goes into remission with no explanation. Those were the coincidences—the miracles. Where this one fell, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t a “miracle,” but it was a bloody big coincidence. And Anne didn’t believe it was . . . a coincidence—not for one fucking second.

  She’d never seen the phenomenon before, not in fifteen years of telomere research. Never read of it, not so much as a tiny research note of a speculation in an obscure genetics journal no one read.

  What would be the function? And why the bloody hell hadn’t the researcher shouted it from the rooftops, published in Nature and every journal in the field? It made no sense. At all.

  “You ready for greasy deep fried?”

  Had she really been staring at the screen for an hour?

  “Not quite. I want to show you something. Come here.” Anne held up two scans.

  “Okay. So the first one, you showed me before? The gem. I’d love a copy of it. The crystals are really cool . . . and that phage thing. I still can’t figure that puzzle out. Love to try, though.”

  “Phage things,” Anne corrected, smiling. “Lots of them. And I owe you that at least. It was your multimillion-dollar machine, after all.”

  “So, what’s the other one?”

  “Look closer.”

  “Okay . . . chromosome pair. Male. Good telomere presentation. What kind of dye did you use?”

  “Closer. Do you see them?”

  “The little dots? What are they?”

  Anne ignored the question. “So, the researcher who provided the tissue sample said the telomeres were boosted with hTERT . . . hepatic hTERT.”

  “Why? Your patient has a liver issue?”

  “Some novel gene therapy—for GPC.”

  “GPC? Wow, that would be great if it worked, but others have tried boosting the telomeres. It hasn’t. What’s different? So, the dots are—?”

  “My client said it’s the specific cell line. He did something to it. Enhanced it with superhero reverse transcriptase . . . or something. I need to take a closer look. It’s nothing I’ve ever seen. It must be something completely new. If it was a thing, I’d know about it, and I’m completely baffled.”

  “Your client. The kid’s father? You didn’t talk to the primary investigator?”

  “He ‘prefers to remain anonymous,’ so says Daddy. But now I’m going to push the issue. My first call after lunch.” A knot had formed in the pit of Anne’s stomach from the first moment she’d glanced at the new image, and it had only tightened, nudging her toward a theory she’d rather ignore despite the rather loud klaxon horns blaring away in her head. “Let’s get out of here. I’m famished.”

  A gorgeous day. The sort of cloudless afternoon when it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the water began. The walk down to the shore helped a bit with Anne’s mood. She couldn’t get the weird coincidence from her mind. “Mind if we visit the glass museum as long as we’re here? I could use a good clearing of the cobwebs, and that museum . . .” It was only a short walk down the pier.

  “Sure. Gotta be back for a team meeting at two-thirty, though.”

  “Oh, we don’t have to go, if you’ve got to prep. Been there, and all that.”

  “All set. So. How well did you know our Gaelan?”

  “Well enough, but not very well at all, I suppose. We were close—for a very, very short time. Until—”

  “We’re here.” They went through the swinging door of a weathered wooden shack that looked like it would topple with the next big wind gust. “I’ll order.” Dana turned to talk to the counter man. “My usual. Two, please.”

  “How much do I owe—”

  “My treat today.” A tray with two small paper bags was passed over the high counter and they sat at a small umbrella table just above a small beach. “So, Gaelan . . . he never mentioned you. I mean, knowing I was a molecular biologist, I would have thought—”

  “We only just met . . . after his accident.” Anne had told Dana nothing about her involvement with Transdiff or how she and Gaelan had connected. Some information was better left unshared. “Hey. These little fish are delicious. What are they called?”

  “Smelts. And for about a month, you can get them. And then no more for a year. At least not local smelts. These little shacks make the best. Deep fried and greasy as hell. Trigger a coronary in the healthiest of hearts. And right on top of the equally dripping French fries. Guess you’d call it Chicago-style fish ‘n’ chips. Minus the newspaper wrapper.”

  “Think they’ve got malt vinegar?”


  Dana pointed her toward a small card table leaned up against the shack.

  The tissue sample continued to nibble at the edges of Anne’s mind. “Dana, you’re going to think me quite mad, but I have this niggling notion about those little points in the scan.”

  “And . . .”

  “And I wonder if those dots are the same as those in my necklace.”

  “That’s quite a leap, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. Crazy, huh?”

  “Yeah. I mean think about it. You see a strange artifact on a scan; yeah, it’s weird, and the thingies in your necklace are all sorts of weird. Actually, weird doesn’t begin to describe it. Anyway. Now you see it in this completely different image. An interesting coincidence? Yes. Worthy of further study? Perhaps. You can always do the same sort of scan you did with the pendant. See them up close.”

  “That was to be my next step. You know, I think I’m going to take a pass at the museum. Maybe I’ll stop by after work, if they’re open, but something just occurred to me. You do know that leaps like that are what make for the best discoveries ever? What if I’ve stumbled onto something?”

  “From your necklace? Really? Something you’re not telling me? Care to share with the class?”

  “Just a hunch. I’d rather not say, for now, anyway. You go ahead. I have to get back home—”

  Dana nodded. “You sure you’re all right? You seem distracted.”

  Anne shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. See you later. Meet for a beer?”

  “Sorry. Date with my wife. Tomorrow?”

  Anne hoped she was wrong, and knew she wasn’t. The coincidence was too striking to be anything but what she’d already guessed. There was really only one way to tell, and it was easy. The vial of blood Gaelan had given her still sat packed in dry ice at the back of Simon’s refrigerator. Two days—if she was lucky—to culture Gaelan’s blood sample into a useable cell strain. Then she would know whether the mystery cell line—Alcott’s “present”—and Gaelan’s were one and the same. And if she were right? What then?