by Keith Thomas
“Why? Homologous recombination isn’t working?”
“No, it is. But it’s inconsistent.”
“So you mix it up. Try microhomology-mediated end joining.”
“We have. It’s— We think it’s on the machinery end.”
“I don’t understand, Dr. Sykes,” Rade said. “I gave you the solution.”
“We ran it and there are still problems.”
“What problems?”
Dorothy had spent the last two days in meetings. Sometimes meetings within meetings where she joined a videoconference call while in a departmental working group. She prided herself on being the leader, on being able to switch mental gears with surprising ease. Mostly, she liked how her quick thinking surprised people at the table or on the other end of the camera. There was a process to “thinking in three dimensions,” that’s what she dubbed the skill, and it involved focusing on the salient details first. Like speed-reading, Dorothy had taught herself how to pick out the imperative stuff and abandon the clutter in only a few seconds.
Thinking in three dimensions was a skill. And one that made leaders look good. But Dorothy knew that being a leader also meant looking like a leader. Staying fit. Staying strong. Talking like you mean everything you say. Regardless of whether you actually did.
“It’s rather complicated,” Dorothy said.
“Don’t belittle me. I have a gun.”
“Of course,” Dorothy said as she stood and grabbed another towel from the shelf. “We can go to the facility now, if you’d like. It’s probably best if you saw it all firsthand. You can see how the solution fits in for yourself and come to your own conclusions.”
Dorothy looked to Rade for an answer.
“Fine,” Rade said. “Hurry.”
35
7:13 A.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
JESSE BROWN VA MEDICAL CENTER
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
RADE ALWAYS HATED being in hospitals.
Yet it seemed a particularly cruel twist of fate that he’d ended up spending all his childhood under medical supervision and much of his adulthood walking down the quiet halls, passing through the antiseptic labs, and eating the near-tasteless cafeteria food of countless hospitals. He could live with the food, the sterile environment, it was the patients that made his skin crawl—hospitals traded in an illusion of cleanliness, when in fact they were bastions of unchecked disease.
Following Dorothy down a narrow hallway, he was keenly aware of everyone that passed him, every opportunity for infection. While Dr. Sykes was dressed in business attire and a lab coat with a stethoscope around her neck, Rade was garbed in a new tracksuit and hoodie. Per usual, he was wearing latex gloves, but he’d also pulled shoe covers over his sneakers and had a blue carbon-filter face mask.
As Rade feared, the hospital was crowded with the usual worrisome assortment: harried doctors scrambling to get from room to room, charts and clipboards in hand; jaded nurses in comfortable shoes; and, worse, waiting rooms filled with Vietnam-era bearded and scraggly men with their wives and the younger, straitlaced vets, many missing limbs.
Dorothy navigated the crowds carefully, weaving through doors she unlocked with a passkey on a lanyard, twirling the Aurora fountain pen in her hand.
Rade followed closely behind, ignoring the disabled, the ill, and the angry.
He felt like Lucifer among hell’s teeming masses. An angel, albeit a rogue one, thrown down with the fetid hordes. He didn’t walk past them so much as he walked above them. Poor pieces of shit were so mired in their animal selves that they didn’t even bother to look up at him as he passed.
“This way,” Dorothy said.
Dorothy stopped at a service elevator. Her passkey worked here as well, allowing them to access the hospital’s private sixth floor. When the elevator arrived, Rade stepped inside first, eager to get away from the crowds.
When the doors opened again, Rade followed Dorothy down an empty corridor to a double door. The large room behind the doors felt like a factory. There were tracks on the floor and large blocks of machinery sitting about, all of them linked together by miles of wire, cable, and hawsers; people in scrubs and smocks milled about, comparing notes on tablets. Dorothy crossed the room to a linear particle accelerator—a LINAC machine. It resembled an MRI on steroids—its cyclopean eye stared down from the ceiling like the tail end of a telescope.
“Dr. Sykes?”
One of the people at the back of the room walked over. He had a mess of curly hair and large-framed glasses. His badge read ANNO. “The machine is calibrated,” he said. “Still having trouble with the flattening filters but—”
“This is a cannon, not a scalpel. We agree on that?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the patient?”
Anno pointed with his chin to a drooling and shaved man in a wheelchair. Two nurses stood beside him. They wore full face guards and elbow-length rubber gloves. Rade noticed the gloves were neoprene, black and shiny. There was something undeniably sexy about them. Rade typically used the nitrile powder-free gloves, the purple kind, because they were easy to find and comfortable. But he made a mental note to ask the nurses where they got the neoprene ones.
The man in the wheelchair had purple bags under his eyes, heavy with fluid. Rade guessed the man hadn’t slept in a while. He was desperately near death.
“Begin,” Dorothy told Anno.
Anno, in turn, signaled the nurses. They wheeled the ill man to a rough X marked by duct tape beneath the lens of the LINAC machine. The man sat slumped there, too sick to even look up at the equipment towering over him.
Anno handed Dorothy a tablet. She held it so Rade could see the screen.
“This is Mr. Taylor Heyerdahl, aged fifty-six,” Dorothy said. “He is of average intelligence and has undergone several days of thought-reform treatments including electroshock and hourly, regimented doses of temazepam and scopolamine. As you can see from his readings, there is still significant, though dulled, electrical activity in the fronto-striatal circuitry and the hippocampus. He’s exactly where we’ve been stuck for the past twenty years. If the solution works, we’ll see that neural activity skip a beat before we reset it.”
Anno signaled the team manning a computer bank on the far side of the room. The LINAC clanked to life. The machine rattled and knocked like a metal poltergeist. The beams emanating from its lens were invisible but their effect on Mr. Taylor Heyerdahl was not. He spasmed in his chair and spat as his tongue protruded from his mouth. The sound he made was inhuman. All the blood vessels in his eyes popped simultaneously, painting his sclera bright red, before he died of a massive heart attack. With the test over, the LINAC machine instantly fell silent. Dorothy turned to Rade and shrugged.
“Fifty-One lied to you. To protect her daughter.”
“The solution . . .”
“It’s incorrect, very clever but incorrect. Maybe she changed one number? Maybe she changed ten? What she provided us looked like it broke the cipher but it didn’t. It just gave us what looked like answers.”
“I looked into her eyes. She wasn’t hiding anything.”
“She tricked you. Or she remembered wrong.”
Rade pulled the Bren Ten from the back of his pants and shot Anno in the chest. Anno fell backward, his face registering nothing. His tablet shattered on the floor. Techs scrambled, ducking for cover. Rade tracked them with the barrel of the gun as Dorothy approached him, hands raised, desperate.
“Rade, please, you can’t just—”
“Say that again.”
Dorothy’s face tightened but she relented.
“Please, Rade. Please stop this.”
“The best and the brightest,” Rade spat, “you love to tell me how you have to turn away every genius who comes to your door to work on this project. You’re telling me none of these people can solve the problem? How many decades has this organization spent spinning its wheels and grinding gears? I’m beginning to think that Dr. Theri
ault was smarter than all of you combined.”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
Dorothy stepped in front of Rade.
He pushed the gun to her chin.
Dorothy narrowed her eyes. She was brave, not like the techs and scientists who scattered across the lab at the sound of a single gunshot. Rade respected that about her. Willing to die for a cause.
“It isn’t about intelligence,” Dorothy said. “It’s about technology.”
“We’re light-years more advanced now. Don’t bullshit me.”
“No, you’re right,” Dorothy said, “and that’s exactly the problem. The math Dr. Theriault was doing was old-school. Artisanal. Everything was so . . . compartmentalized back then, it’s a wonder we even know the answers we do. Over the past forty years we’ve broken only two of the ciphers she used for her journals. And none of those addressed the genetic issues we need answered.”
“So you work backward, you reverse engineer it.”
“What I’m saying is, we might know some of the answers, but the problem is we don’t know what questions she was asking. We’ve managed, through brute force, to develop algorithms that buffer the areas. . . .”
Rade eased his finger from the trigger.
Nodding, Dorothy reached up and carefully pulled the gun from her chin.
“You see the machine is real,” she said. “It functions. We can prime subjects with targeted treatments to block CRH receptors before hitting the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. The beam is strong, but we can’t get the wavelength right. As you can clearly see, Mr. Heyerdahl’s brain was effectively fried. You are right: all these brilliant people can’t solve this. Not like you can. You got us close with Fifty-One, but . . . for whatever reason, it didn’t work. If you want to cure yourself and move this research forward, then I need you to get the girl. She isn’t like her mother. The memories will be fresh. Her brain is malleable. Find her and we can wrench the real solution from her.”
Rade tucked the Bren Ten away and Dorothy visibly relaxed.
“Fine,” he said, “but the leash comes off.”
“Rade . . .”
“I’m on my own.”
“I cannot allow you to continue . . . this.” Dorothy motioned back to Anno’s corpse and the widening pool of blood coagulating under him. “Cleaning up your mess at the gym was more than enough. I’m not sure the city of Chicago will buy another crazed mass shooter—especially one who works for a Fortune 500. My God, Rade, I have to frame one of our investors. Do you know how bad that looks? And now this? A research scientist?”
“He killed himself,” Rade said, walking away. “Happens all the time.”
36
8:52 A.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CENTER FOR INTEGRATIVE NEUROSCIENCE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
DR. TAMIKO KADREY opened her office door to find Matilda and a young African American girl waiting for her.
She looked taken aback, but considering everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours, Matilda was sure she’d understand. While she wasn’t a close friend, Tamiko was kind and respectful. Despite the fact that they didn’t always see eye to eye on research—Tamiko was convinced there might actually be a biological basis for the inheritance of memory—they bonded over a love of loud music, bad men, and red wine.
“Tamiko,” Matilda said, standing up. “Sorry to bust in like this.”
“It’s okay. I called you, remember? Are you okay?”
They hugged. The warmth felt good. It was crazy, Matilda thought, how a simple touch, just skin-to-skin contact, could instantly relax her.
“You heard about Clark—”
“Yes, I’m so sorry.”
“This thing has been— I don’t even know how to describe it. Roller coaster, earthquake, nothing really fits. And it’s not over. There are people after . . . Well, we’re just trying to get our footing again is all.”
“People after you? This about Clark’s murder?”
Matilda nodded.
“Jesus, Matilda, have you been to the police? You shouldn’t—”
“We’ve talked to the police. There’s a detective helping us out. Kojo something, I don’t recall his last name. We’re safe. We’re okay now.”
Tamiko didn’t look especially convinced. She turned to Ashanique.
“And who are you?”
The girl gave a forced smile.
“My name is Ashanique Walters.”
“Walters?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Tamiko nodded before she hung up her purse and settled into her desk chair. She seemed a bit stiff, a bit formal. Matilda knew Tamiko and her ex-husband had recently gotten into it over alimony payments. She figured things had gotten worse.
Tamiko turned to Matilda. “So how can I help?”
“I don’t know how to say this without it sounding as insane as . . . well, as it is, but I’m convinced that Ashanique has the ability to recall past lives.”
Tamiko looked over at Ashanique.
“Okay . . . ,” she said. “Um . . .”
“We’ve run labs and scans,” Matilda said. “Everything comes back negative. Every psych battery comes back normal. Ashanique isn’t suffering from paranoid delusions or psychosis. And every historical detail, even the most impossible, has proven true. You have to trust me on this. She is remembering lives and experiences she can’t possibly know about.”
“Um, okay . . . Well, then, we should discuss our options. Tests reveal nothing?”
“So far.”
Tamiko leaned back in her chair.
“All right, let’s just talk about this. As you know, there have been some fringe theories about how this past-life thing could work. Engrams, the lateral interpositus nucleus, Purkinje neurons, but I haven’t studied them all in depth. Could be a matter of genetic enhancers. Sometimes a mutated gene can intensify the phenotypes caused by another gene. That results in stunning effects. In labs, they’ve been able to create animals immune to certain neurodegenerative diseases or use the mutated genes to increase muscle mass. And this effect gets stronger as it’s passed down. With each successive generation, it can take on new and more powerful properties. Relatively radical stuff.”
Matilda nodded, understanding, but she wondered how much, if any, Ashanique caught. She looked over at the girl. Ashanique seemed anxious to go.
Tamiko was just getting started, however. Clearly intrigued and excited by the concepts Matilda’s visit had sparked.
“The most logical avenue for the transfer of memories, however, is something called the Morris hypothesis. It suggests that memories can be stored genetically and inherited from parent to child. Are you familiar with the planarian studies in the late 1950s?”
Matilda said, “No. I might have learned about it in college.”
“It’s pretty memorable.”
“A lot of college was kind of a blur, frankly. First time away from home . . .”
Matilda glanced at Ashanique, hoping the girl didn’t get where she was going.
Ashanique said, “I don’t know what either of you are talking about.”
“Okay, well, quick lecture then.” Tamiko grinned. “There was a researcher studying these tiny aquatic worms called planarians. They sound gross, but they’re kind of cute. Have little goofy eyes. Anyway, planarians have the amazing ability to regrow their bodies. If you take one and you cut off its head, it becomes two planarians. The head grows a new body and the body grows a new head. The researcher wanted to look at memory with planarians, and he ran this experiment where he taught some planarians how to navigate a maze. Then he put those planarians in a blender—nasty, I know—and fed their bodies to planarians that had never been in the maze. And guess what happened?”
“They threw up,” Ashanique joked.
Tamiko laughed.
“No,” she continued. “They knew how to navigate the maze. Crazy, right? The finding was shocking. It
suggested that memory could be stored in the body and transferred. Alas, no other scientists were able to replicate the experiment. So it was dismissed and forgotten. But what you’re suggesting is that there’s a kernel of truth to the planarian idea—that the Morris hypothesis is correct and memories can be transferred. Only way for us to find out is to run some tests. I’d be looking for crazy electrical stuff going on in the hippocampus. Maybe signs of expanding neural networking and, well, something we’ve never actually seen before.”
“Can you do these tests here?”
“Yes. But ideally we’d do genetic studies, with multiple generations of Ashanique’s family. That would give us a clearer picture.”
“I’m the only one left,” Ashanique said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tamiko replied. “Well then, we’ll just have to see what’s going on inside your head and make deductions based on that information. What are the things you’re remembering? Can you tell me some of the specifics?”
“A soldier dying in World War One,” Ashanique said. “His name was George Edwin Ellison.”
“Okay. Anyone else?”
“Dozens more. All sorts of people throughout history, like a boy who hunts a tiger in the jungle. There are people, doctors like you, at this military base in the forest. I see that a lot. In fact, I think you look just like someone who was there.”
Tamiko smiles, turns to Matilda.
“I don’t know. You’re clearly convinced something is going on. I get that and I respect your judgment. So we’ll do the tests—we’ll do electrical stimulation on some particular parts of the hippocampus while running a few standard visual programs—and see what comes back. That sound good?”
Matilda nodded and looked back at Ashanique.
“I guess,” the girl said, staring hard at Tamiko.
“By the way, why now?” Tamiko asked as she gathered up some papers. “Why would these past-life memories suddenly just appear two days ago?”
Ashanique looked down at her lap.
“My mom said because of my period.”
“Your mom knew about this condition?”
“Yes. She had it too.”