LifeGames Corporatoin

by Michael Smorenburg

  “Can’t imagine…” Catherine made a small show of puzzlement, then thought she saw a way to get back to her subtle interrogation; “But fatigue is different, Ken, fatigue’s like a car without gas, when the tank’s empty it’s done—surely?”

  “A little patience…” Ken assured, swallowing one of the several Jägermeister shots he’d lined up; Catherine’s didn’t match him. “We needed to give our investors something tangible, we took a street kid, maybe nine or ten, skinny as a rail…” he held up his middle finger, provocatively gesturing more than extreme skinny-stiffness, “Our hypno-sequence did its thing, convincing him he was a steel rod that couldn’t flex. We stuck his heels on one chair and his head only just on another, no support in between. It was astonishing to behold… no flex in his body… stiff as a plank. I got one of the porkier bankers, maybe two forty plus pounds of lard; sat him squarely in the middle of the kid. And you know what? Nothing—he didn’t budge, not an inch—like a park bench.”

  “A bit irresponsible…!” Catherine blurted, unimpressed.

  “Not at all, Cath,” Ken offhandedly brushed her concerns aside, “Forget the kiddie sentiments… my point is that there’s no way a kid like that… malnourished into the bargain… no way he could’ve done it awake—not a chance. But with self-doubt removed and replaced by affirmation—no problem.”

  As Ken mused at the strange anomaly lurking within even the lowliest human cur, Catherine felt once again irked by Ken’s brash disregard. An experiment like this was outrageous yet he seemed unable to grasp that. The strains of hypocrisy accused her again; Ken’s attitude belied all the warm and fuzzy PR spin her company was trying to weave for LifeGames as a benevolent caregiver to humanity’s needs.

  Everything about him caused her the agony of wrestling with her own hypocrisy; she was attracted to him and repulsed at the same time. It wasn’t the money or power—that would be something she could still justify to herself, no, it was worse than that—it was the danger he represented, and she was a dreadful risk taker.

  Ken was entirely oblivious to her expression of distaste for him, he just laughed at her with condescension, as he would to a child;

  “That’s just history, my girl. You’re too funny with your concerns for the great unwashed… you can’t save them all, you know. What’s important is what I need to discuss with you that impacts on our next PR phase. I did brief you about our new innovation? Well, this is it, it’s time I disclosed it: Nutrition patches. They’re doing great in trials.”

  There wasn’t time to mull the awkward sentiments of moments before, it was go-time and Catherine needed to be up to the task;

  “You’re saying, it’s the answer to fatigue?”

  “You got it! Pretty trusted technology, borrowed from NASA but amended for our needs. We’re almost ready for commercial applications.”

  “Ahhhh, I remember some noise about the NASA breakthrough…”

  “Not really rocket science, just a high-yield enzyme-catalyzing monomer held on a transdermal patch. It facilitates gluconeogenesis… it’s a whole mouthful of polysaccharide jargon that I’m too battle weary tonight to recount, but it’s a dynamite little innovation! In layman-speak it supplements energy, a real kicker for the metabolism directly through the skin.”

  “It’s a sucrose plaster? You’ve added more sucrose?” Catherine quizzed, intending to draw Ken’s confidence, she pretended to know less science than she feigned through her question; she’d read up on the NASA innovation when Newsweek had covered it years before.

  “A bit more than that… you’re a girl, it may be a bit much for you.” Ken winked as if it was a joke, but there was too much truth in his attitude for it to be funny. He was mulling a thought and smoothing a non-existent moustache, weighing how far he’d open up. “I’m going to disclose some facts… strictly off the record—above top-secret, understand?”

  He lifted another shot glass, examining it minutely; it was a ruse, his peripheral scanned past it to Catherine, looking for any flinch in her that might suggest she was not worthy of the top-secret confidentiality rating on her file.

  “You want the lay-speak or you want it raw…?”

  He was confident she’d overestimate her own smarts and opt for the detail—and he intended to lay it on thick, to bury her in so much information that she’d retain none of it; exaggerating some aspects, inventing others. But he’d be faithful to the details that she needed in order to do her job.

  “Pretend I’m smart,” she challenged.

  “Fine… Do you know why we never patented the process?” he posed, then continued without waiting for an answer. “It’s the Cola strategy—When you patent you’ve gotta reveal the details of the process, and that’s the worst tactical move; so we buried what’s a fairly simple concept behind a firewall of physical security and complex jargon. Once we had it configured, the truth is that there’s not much to it. By reverse engineering our breakthroughs, our two or three competitors are actually closer on our heels than we’ll publicly admit; we know how close they are, we know what they’re not yet seeing… fortunately they have no clue how close they are. I’ve got inside scope on them; they’re right there with our processes, probably a month or two from cracking it… they even have innovations of their own that are, well… worrying. We can no longer rely on first-move advantage. Off the record, we desperately need this breakthrough to put real distance between us and them.”

  Catherine felt her pulse quicken. He was telling her that the company was in a crisis—desperate—they were facing dire competition from government agencies that were their key clients. She’d heard murmurs that something fundamental was shifting in the organization; something groundbreaking, she’d been stonewalled on details, now she realized why.

  “Do you understand epilepsy?” he asked unexpectedly.

  “It’s a neurological disease,” there was a shift in her mood, fear.

  “No, not a disease, a neurological state—there’s a difference.”

  “That’s what I meant—a genetic… uhmm… disorder.”

  “No—in this case it’s a state. You’re correct to call it genetic and disorder when it occurs naturally, but we’ve mastered the process of inducing it with anyone, so it’s just a state. We can switch it on and off at will.” He looked at her closely, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I… I’m sorry, I’m taken aback,” she stammered. “My… my family…” searching for the words, “We have a, uhhmm… a history. I was a toddler… I lost my older sister to it, to epilepsy. She had an event… in the pool. I thought it was a game. I remember the funeral, it was raining.”

  “Gee…” Ken said; it sounded hollow.

  He knew that he was no good with emotional sentiments and avoided them. He hesitated, wondering what to add;

  “Well, yeah… Thirty years ago treatments were crude, a cure’s a lot closer now.” It came out unfeeling, so he added, “I’m… sorry Cath. Sorry about your sister… if it was today…” then ran out of small talk.

  It was an uncomfortable moment, Ken and Catherine both wanting the sidetrack behind them so that the conversation could move on; each with their own objectives for it to do so.

  “Crap happens… As you say… it’s long ago, just got me off balance.” She gave him a smile that acknowledged the unintentional gaffe as meaningless; “Anyway…. Interesting stuff you’re up to; I had no idea about the medical… the pharmaceutical angle within LifeGames…?”

  The diversion aside, this was gold for Catherine; a new thread to unpick that might run all the way to snippets of conversation she’d picked up earlier in his office.

  “Good… it’s good you had no idea, it means we’re getting it right, keeping the news under the radar. It’s time for disclosure, you need a grasp of what we’re up to, to do your job properly.”

  “Great. But if you’re messing with… with epilepsy and inducing it, that’s pretty heavy. That’s proper medicine, genetics? Where are you hiding the wh
ite coats?”

  “Not on the admin floors.”

  “Fair enough. But if you’re employing specialists… with those skill sets… surely a flag would pop-up somewhere? The press would’ve been on it in a second.”

  “Keep going,” he encouraged, “it’s why we’re talking now… still off the record. You need to be briefed; we’ve had, well… a few… problems recently and the press is starting to sniff. You might have heard a few of my calls earlier. I wasn’t happy.”

  She allowed that she had.

  “I don’t want anyone getting hurt, but we have had to, how shall I put it delicately…? Persuade a few of the more persistent editors that there isn’t a story here. You’re going to have to run interference I’m afraid….”

  He looked at her hard now and she responded on cue;

  “That’s what I do.”

  “Good. What I don’t do,” Ken responded, “is the details of all the science; so don’t quiz me. I’ve got a fair working knowledge—enough to be dangerous, I’ll give you access to some of the operations people if you need to get confirmations.” He offered. “Our team is offsite, the one working on the pharmaceuticals. It’s rather, well, clandestine at the moment. We anonymously and openly support certain charities who in turn make large donations to universities; sometimes the money goes half way around the world through various gateways before it lands in the, uhhmm, right hands.”

  “And the right hands are university research labs?” She ventured.

  “Sure”

  “Cardiff? San Diego? Nagasaki? Petersburg?”

  “You have been doing homework,” there was suspicion in his voice.

  “No—I read it in Newsweek, I’ve got a good memory for detail. There was speculation as to why and how unrelated universities had all come into the money at once. As you say, ears prick up when teams of neural specialists come into unaccounted money for research. My ears pricked up because you don’t have facilities in these centers. It struck me as… significant.”

  Ken had hoped that the press articles wouldn’t make the connections so obvious, but he consoled himself that it was only because she now had privileged information that made the dot-connections possible for a smart person with a good memory.

  “Okay—so you provide finance, and the results of key research finds its way back to you?”

  “A little more complicated than that, but it’ll do.” He sipped and continued, “The early pharmaceuticals for epilepsy were called anticonvulsants. Now there’s a whole raft of new and exotic cocktails; gabapentin, topiramate, levetiracetam, lamotrigine, pregabalin, tiagabine… the pronunciation’s a bitch, don’t quote me.”

  “Like I could,” Catherine quipped.

  “Collectively they’re called Antiepileptic drugs, AEDs… What I’m painting for you is a picture of our extreme vigilance, our meticulous attention to detail… it’s an insurance policy when things go wrong. You may need this info if we ever need to defend ourselves in the press.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing important… but the potential is always there. It’s important we know how to turn off what we trigger. The cocktails to turn off the epilepsy that we induce, work by blocking sodium channels and modulating calcium channels, the effect is that we inhibit neuron firing and interrupt neurotransmitters; more details than that aren’t important right now. What is important for this conversation is that we’ve developed anti-AEDs—it’s a delicate push-pull to control the condition, we prompt it and we turn it off very precisely.”

  Catherine suppressed her shock this time. Something sinister slid within her that went beyond her personal attachment to the malady; they were playing with fire, she knew it instinctively and it terrified her.

  “So anti-AEDs have a similar effect to strobing lights? Like the TV news warnings for flash photography?”

  “Clever girl, yes. But flashing lights only trigger epileptic events in epileptics.”

  “By events, you mean fits?”

  “Fits are a symptom, don’t get confused and hung up on fits—we’re not triggering fits, we’re triggering a special class of epilepsy. Epilepsy only describes the brain activity, not the reaction, understand?”

  She nodded.

  “Fits are out of control, we control everything, absolutely everything.”

  “Now are you administering the Anti-AEDs…? Or the AEDs for that matter?”

  “I was wondering when you’d twig to that… The software needs to do the magic with the AEDs and the Anti… it needs to dole them out according to the second-by-second telemetry data returning from our monitor. Now, all that detail stays in these four walls—the patch’s main function used to be as a carrier for the nutritional side, and we’ll just keep that idea rolling along in the public perception when the time comes, so that’s front of mind from here on out—that’s all we feed to the press when the time comes—got it?”

  “It’s great for my professional ethics,” she grimaced.

  “If you’re having problems with ethics, tell me now and we’ll…”

  “Have me eliminated?”

  She said it as a joke but he nodded just perceptibly—she hated herself all over again for being attracted to danger.

  “You’re on the inside now, Cath. I’m serious, so take this seriously.”

  She looked down into her lap, chastened.

  “I’m not threatening… not trying to scare you. You’ll be well paid. Trust me, it’s very controlled.”

  She nodded agreement.

  “The patch proved perfect for a dual role… We paste it strategically where blood supply is close to the surface. The NASA patch was dumb—it was passive, simple. It was slow-bleed, slow release. If we used Anti-AEDs on a passive patch, we’d definitely induce a fit that could run out of control. So we made it active, releasing the active chemicals to match our need. The patch is RF active, Wi-Fi radio linked to the computer, and the computer is monitoring metabolic rate and neural activity, releasing dosage on demand… The whole system’s now A.I.”

  “A - I…?”

  “Artificial intelligence…”

  “The patch has artificial intelligence?”

  “Yes. It’s integral to the whole system. It’s like another neuron in a brain. It has circuitry. It has some autonomy. But the whole process—our back-end with the patch—that collectively is A.I. It learns on the fly, it teaches itself, it spawns new sub-routines. We’re at the point that we can create a new routine by giving system specific URLs, bona fide Web addresses where details are available. The unit interrogates the site and builds a program from it, just a like a human operator would… Let’s say we need to assess a fire-foreman to manage a major disaster. Take the biggest, the 9/11 Twin Towers. All we need do is point to 9-11 sites that have the details, the findings, the footage. For illustration let’s say we point it to Wiki; and the A.I. takes it from there. It creates the whole program from what it finds. A bit of tweaking to ensure it’s right, and its done.”

  “Your A.I. can do that?”

  “Sure—that’s what Artificial Intelligence is. It’s intelligent. It’s autonomous. It’s a neural network like a brain. It comprehends, compares and makes decisions. In many respects we’re now just handlers. Jockeys steering it. And that… that our A.I. is this advanced, it is off the record. It doesn’t leave this table.”

  “You gotta be kidding. Amazing,” she mumbled dreamily, mesmerized by what she was hearing, back under Ken’s spell, lost again in her detestable lust for danger. “I want to make sure I’m getting this,” her mind tumbling with the revelations. “What exactly are you getting out of all this?”

  Ken sipped again, smacking his lips at the sting of the liquor; deliberately letting her stew, considering how much more to impart. He’d opened the Pandora’s box and taken out enough of its toys to manipulate her for his objectives, but he was mindful to keep the rest of the skeletons sequestered safely inside.

  Catherine saw his cageyness so she angled as best
she could to get him back to details. “Come on Mr. Torrington… you’ve got my attention, you have my word,” she demanded with her most girlish charm.

  “Are you religious?” he suddenly posed.

  Again, it wasn’t a question she’d anticipated and her mind raced to estimate her best response. “If I was, what would it matter?”

  “Oh, it wouldn’t matter a great deal. Just that, with a religious disposition you may have a specific view on what I’m about to tell you; the downside is that your barriers will go up—you’ll have the urge to deny what I’m going to say.”

  “Okay… no, I’m not, for what it’s worth… not at all religious. I’m a bit spiritual, I guess you could say, but not religious.”

  “Spiritual’s same as religious in this regard, less… uhhmm,” he looked for a word, “Less… feral, perhaps. People who label themselves ‘religious’ tend to be hostile to facts they fear might explain their mindset. It’s in their outlook to remain ignorant of some facts is a goal.” He sipped again. “…Epilepsy has several dozen manifestations. You heard of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy—TLE?”

  “No.”

  “Temporal tells you where it’s located in the brain, just above the ears. Now when this sector malfunctions it causes hallucinations, visions and voices that aren’t really there. A lot of research has been done on this branch of medicine. Several decades ago a researcher—Geschwind—a neurologist, first noted hyper-religious symptoms that stemmed from TLE—it’s called the Geschwind syndrome. There’s a whole branch of study called Neurotheology that investigates the symptoms. It’s fascinating and answers a lot of questions about our superstitious minds.”

  “Really?” Catherine was riveted.

  “They speculate that individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy have a tendency to experience states of consciousness called Euphoriaor Samdhi. These characters often find their place in traditional cultures as religious figures, as shamans and witch doctors. It explains a lot about our cultures.”

  Ken was relaxed now, on firm territory and egged on by her enthusiasm for the topic;