by Drew Magary
To the very end, Otto remained ambivalent about his discovery and its rapid spread. “I was overjoyed when we did the Alzheimer’s study and found what we found,” he wrote in his journal. “The idea that we could cure this disease that has ravaged so many families, the idea that we could prevent people’s memories from being erased—that was wonderful. And certainly I was excited at the financial prospect of the cure, the kind of money it could generate for the university, as well as for me and my family. I’m not immune to that part of it. That was all very exciting. But when I heard about David Spitz, and what he had done with it, I realized that we had triggered a kind of frenzy we were totally unprepared to deal with. You know, science is usually agony. You conduct millions of experiments just to move the world forward a millimeter. But in a way, that’s a good thing. Science gives us time to adjust. But the cure hasn’t been like that. I discovered it too quickly, odd as that may sound. That’s why, from the outset, I agreed with the president’s decision to ban it. I was glad someone was willing to step back and declare that we needed to know everything about this treatment before we unleashed it upon every citizen. Obviously, that didn’t stop it from spreading. But I’m glad someone stood up and took that stance. It needed to be done. A lot of the world fell in line quickly after that. And that’s good. Just because I benefited from sloppy handiwork doesn’t mean the rest of us will. Because we still don’t know what future effects this cure will have. Think about how many treatments have been fasttracked for approval by the FDA that eventually needed to be recalled. This cure could end up not working. And that might be the very-best-case scenario! Heaven help us all if it really does work.”
Graham Otto would never get to find out.
It was another late night in the lab. Despite his astonishing success, Otto had yet to realize any of the potential financial gain from his breakthrough. He dedicated himself to making sure the cure was 100 percent bulletproof, so that it might one day gain legitimate FDA approval and prompt the president to overturn the ban—that is, to overturn it at the right time, not when people found it most convenient or profitable. Otto was monitoring over a half-dozen species that night, comparing their statuses against control groups, trying to detect the slightest sign of aging. The Hair Bears were with him: Dr. Peter Madden, Dr. Brian Lo, Dr. Sidney Brown, and three PhD candidates (Candace Malkin, Dinesh Ganji, and Michael Duggan) in his now-growing department.
The University of Oregon has a security infrastructure that is the envy of most other colleges. Every building requires hologram identification worn on a lanyard. Every entrance is covered by surveillance cameras. The campus is extremely well lit, and hundreds of emergency phones dot the area, for easy access by any students or staff who feel immediately threatened.
But the Hair Bears’ lab was no longer located on the Oregon campus. Due to the success of Otto’s program, the university had agreed to build a new lab for him and his cohorts—a facility they hoped would rival any genetics lab in America. But while it was being built, the team, which had already outgrown its old quarters, was forced to work out of a makeshift lab in a nearby office park.
The Shelby Office Park looks very much like any other office park in the nation. It’s located on Shelby Circle, right near a strip of chain restaurants and home-improvement stores. It’s a poorly lit complex—even now, after what happened. A walk from the Shelby parking lot to one of the main buildings in the dead of night is enough to jangle even the toughest nerves. A card-key is needed to enter any of the buildings on the park’s campus. But the parking lot has no such requirement. Parking is free, and there’s no gate to check into. Anyone can drive up to the main buildings. And on the night of August 7, 2012, someone did.
An unmarked van pulled up to the curb in front of Building D, where the Hair Bears made their temporary home. The team typically finished up work at the same time, but Otto was known to tell everyone to go home and get their rest, while staying on alone in the lab—sometimes for a little while, sometimes for hours. (Although he enjoyed the company of his coworkers, Otto claimed to focus better when undisturbed.) From what police have been able to reconstruct, it seems that night he bade his colleagues goodbye and stayed in the lab for a scant ten extra minutes. After he closed up shop, he grabbed his briefcase and made his way down to the lobby.
As he exited the building, he saw the van. He likely also noticed that there were still four bikes parked in the rack next to the building entrance. Many of the team members used bikes, instead of cars, to get around town. The rack should have been empty. In the time it took Otto to recognize that something was amiss, three men had exited the van and accosted him.
They wore black from head to toe, with black hoods covering their heads. They had guns. They forced Otto to the ground and bound his legs, arms, and mouth with duct tape.
They dragged Otto to the van and opened the back. There Otto saw, to his horror, all six of his colleagues, similarly bound and piled on top of each other—a writhing tangle of bodies. They threw Otto in with the rest, doused them and the van with gasoline, and set it on fire. The three assailants then fled the scene as the van burst into flames. Only one of them, Casey Jarrett of Tacoma, has been identified and charged. Jarrett, who belongs to a pro-death evangelical sect known as Terminal Earth, defended his actions only by saying, “A little bit of bloodshed now or a lot later on.” Otto, Madden, Lo, Brown, Malkin, Ganji, and Duggan all perished in the blaze. Just hours later, David Spitz was gunned down outside his home in Seattle.
President Lack still has trouble accepting that his friend and colleague died in such a horrifying manner. “It’s inconceivable to me,” he says. “If there was anyone you wanted to invent this cure, it was Graham. He wasn’t some power-mad scientist hell-bent on destroying the world. He had real integrity, and he rarely acted without considering all the consequences of his behavior. The cure was safe in his hands. I don’t think he even gave it to himself. That someone would stalk him down and murder him and six other bright, wonderful minds like that is just . . . It takes away my faith in humanity, a faith that people like Graham instilled in me. He’s not here to guide us through this anymore, and we’re so much poorer for it.”
Two floors above the site where the van burned and burned, a window from Otto’s lab looks out over the parking lot. Perched on the windowsill is a very small glass case containing five fruit flies—five very special fruit flies that turned Graham Otto from a desperate redhead into perhaps the most important scientist in human history. They were the first creatures on earth to be cured of death by Otto, and they were among the last creatures on earth to see him alive.
DATE MODIFIED:
7/5/2019, 9:17 P.M.
“How could you be so dumb?”
I had to get out of Manhattan. Katy merrily haunts me in this place, which I more than deserve. I see visions of her all around: in the kitchen, by the television, lunging out the window. Soon there are so many ghosts of her crowding me that I feel engulfed. Sound reason told me that to stay around much longer was to risk insanity. I had to go see my sister.
I have the good fortune of not having to deal with Penn Station on a daily basis. I’m amazed that current events have managed to create an environment in which dealing with Penn Station is somehow even worse than before. I didn’t know it could get worse. It already seemed to operate at maximum awfulness. Oh, but I was wrong.
This was an exodus. There was a line just to get in the station. I’d never seen that before. A fire marshal was stationed outside every entrance, holding back travelers until a certain number had exited. They let a handful of people in, then held the line again. It was like trying to get into a nightclub—which is perfect in its symmetry. My goal was the six-thirty train. They ran every half hour, so I figured if I missed the six thirty, I could just hop on the seven with a tall boy of Budweiser, and off I’d go. I just barely made the ten-thirty train.
It was around midnight when I pulled in. My sister was waiting for me. She looke
d tired, but she has two kids, so I think she looks the same way at midnight as she does at all other hours of the day. Polly exists in a perpetual daze, run down by the burdens of motherhood and falling further and further behind in rest, never again to reach complete wakefulness. I had specifically asked my dad not to tell her what I had done, because I knew she’d make me feel bad about it. I had already suffered through four hours at Penn Station and a train ride so tightly packed you couldn’t have slipped a dime between the bodies. But then, seeing her, I figured that I may as well get all the pain out of the way immediately. She drove me back to her house and poured me a drink.
I confessed almost immediately. “I got the cure.”
She snapped awake (she can only be alert in short bursts). “What? When?”
“Three weeks ago. That’s not all of it. My roommate and the doctor who gave it to me were killed in the July 3 attacks.”
“Oh my Jesus. Katy? Was that her name? Are you joking?”
“No. I referred her to my cure doctor, and when she went to get her blood drawn, the office was bombed.”
“Oh my God. Are you okay?”
“Not particularly. I . . . I was so excited for her to get it. I didn’t think this could happen, and I still don’t know how it did. And now she’s dead, and I feel like I deserve the same fate.”
“Why did you get the cure? How could you be so dumb? You have to swear right now that you won’t tell Mark that you did it. He’s been talking about it and talking about it. The last thing I want is for you to egg him on.”
“Please don’t castigate me for this.”
“But didn’t you realize the danger you put your roommate in? The danger you put yourself in? These crazy people didn’t just start killing doctors a couple of days ago, John. And you don’t even know if the thing works. I just can’t believe you’d go to some back-alley Guatemalan Dr. Nick to get your life fixed.”
“He wasn’t some quack,” I said defensively. “He was a legitimate doctor with a well-known practice.”
“Yet he chose to engage in some shady side business. Why is that?”
“It was just some ego thing.”
“And that doesn’t bother you, even now? I saw the doctor Mark wanted to visit to get it done. His name was Frankie, and he looked like he stole furniture out of trucks. I’ve heard that some of the people offering to do it aren’t even real doctors. They’re like chiropractors times ten. I’m not judging you for getting it. I’m just worried about you. That’s all.”
“I’m grateful for that, P. I really am. But I’m fine. Mentally, I’m a disaster. But physically I feel fine. Great, as odd as that sounds.”
She grew a touch curious. “So you think it really works, then.”
“We won’t know for a while. I’ve been taking a photo of my face every day just to see if there are any changes over time I don’t readily notice.”
“And you’re not worried about, you know, hogging all the food and stuff ?”
“I promise I won’t eat all the Nilla Wafers in the house, like last time.”
“You know that’s not what I mean. There’s a reason people are fighting so fiercely to keep this cure out of people’s hands. You don’t have kids. I do. I think about this stuff. I think about what’ll be left for them.”
“So you’re never going to get it? And you’ll never let Mark get it?”
She let out a low groan. “I have no idea. I really don’t. I’m guessing there will be a point when it’s legal and everyone has it and I feel obligated to get it too. I was like that with cell phones. I was easily the last of my friends to get one. Everyone else had one. And there I was, outside school at some disgusting pay phone that didn’t even work. Now, of course, I have one and I’ll never go back. That’s how I am. I usually have to be dragged into things. I know it’s probably inevitable that I’ll get the cure and that we’ll all get it. It’s just gonna be something you do. But it opens up all sorts of odd questions that I don’t want to deal with right now. I mean, what happens to Mark and me?”
“Are you guys having problems?”
“No! Not at all. But it’s a whole weird thing, to think you’ll be with someone for that long. I love him, and I’m willing to do it. It’s just . . . daunting. And the kids . . . Jesus. You become a parent, and your whole life becomes about worrying. You just worry constantly whether they’ll be okay. And the idea that I’ll be worried forever about them and what they do . . . I almost have a panic attack when I think about it. I’m worried, and I’m worried about having to worry so goddamn much.”
I told her about all the bankers getting divorced.
“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”
“Sorry.”
“See, that completely freaks me out. One day we’ll get it, and Mark’s friends will all say, ‘Hey, what are you still doing with that old bag?’ ”
“But you won’t be old.”
“But I’m old already. I have two kids. That makes you old. So then I have that to worry about. Do I have the ability to keep my husband happy for centuries upon centuries? Do I need to get lipo so that I can look like some perky goddamn cheerleader? I have no earthly idea, and I don’t like the idea of having to confront all those issues somewhere down the road. Right now my whole life is plagued with decisions that have to be made: what to get for dinner, which school the kids should go to, which kid’s birthday party we should go to this weekend. It’s just decision after decision after decision, from trivial crap to really important things. By the end of the day, I’m mush. I don’t even eat dinner because I don’t want to choose what to have. I have cereal and call it a day. And now there’s this. Big, huge decision alert. Every question I ask myself about it begets a dozen more. It’s giving me a migraine right now, and I haven’t even done anything.”
“It has to be better than the alternative, though.”
“Does it? I don’t know.”
“Well, you say you’re already old. How does growing old feel so far?”
She sighed. “It sucks.”
“Well, now I feel somewhat better about my decision.”
We changed the subject. Polly handed me a plate of cold roast beef and corn off the cob. We talked, and I ate, and for the first time, Katy’s death moved to the back of my consciousness, if only for a moment. This is bereavement: the slow, eventual reassertion of your own meaningless preoccupations. As I ate, the look in Polly’s eyes made it clear she was still thinking about the cure. She had tried for so long to stern the tide, to avoid being overwhelmed by it. But there I was: the tsunami at her doorstep.
DATE MODIFIED:
7/17/2019, 5:09 P.M.
DC Apparently Stands for “Don’t Come”
I have a friend in DC who e-mailed me this in response to reports about the expanded security perimeters to accommodate protesters in Midtown:
Dude, the security bullshit you have to deal with up there is nothing compared to what’s going on down here. The entirety of Northwest DC below M Street has been cordoned off since that girl was beaten to death for her DieStrong bracelet and the riots in Germany started. You can’t drive anywhere downtown. I’m talking about miles the hell away from the White House. And when you come up out of the Metro, there are National Guard members with loaded rifles, and their fingers on the trigger, ready to pull you aside if you look like a threat. They increased the restricted airspace above town by nearly twentyfold. If you come down on a shuttle from Boston to National, you practically have to go through Ohio. It’s insane.
Downtown DC around the Wizards’ arena is essentially a pedestrian thoroughfare now. I have no issue with this, since people in DC can’t drive for shit, except that Metro stops can be goddamn light years away from each other. That scene you described at Penn Station? That’s every Metro station, except here the station escalators never work, so you have to haul ass up four thousand stairs before you get to emerge above ground. And the buses aren’t running. All the protesters have been forced
to demonstrate on the other side of the Potomac, along the bike trail in Arlington. I saw a bunch of them trying to swim across the Potomac to get to the Mall, only to have cops pick them up in a riverboat and haul their sorry asses out of the water. One of them almost drowned in the rip currents.
I have a friend who works on the Hill who says the Supreme Court judges will be moved to an undisclosed location to argue the California case. Lots of bomb threats.
Fucking crazy, man. Fucking crazy.
—MK
DATE MODIFIED:
7/18/2019, 11:07 A.M.
A Blonde Everywhere I Turn
I was walking down Third Avenue today when I spotted a woman across the street with a remarkable body and blonde hair that broke just past her shoulder blades. I turned electric. I saw a gap in traffic and sprinted across the avenue. A cab rounding from Forty-third blithely took the corner and nearly plowed into me. I kept my focus on the blonde as the driver honked three hundred times in the space of four seconds. She didn’t turn her head and kept bouncing down Third, with me trailing behind her and trying to figure out a plan before quickening my pace to identify her. I kept thirty yards behind, dodging dog walkers, tourists, and meandering hordes of the unemployed. I took out my phone and queued up the number for the police, without hitting Send, so I would have it at the ready. I took her picture so I could post it to my feed if need be. If this blonde was the blonde, I’d call the police and alert them to her presence, then follow her until they arrived to detain her.