Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  The long forgotten lyrics of the Eagles song played on the boat radio as Will tied up the boat at the little casino on the California side of Lake Havasu. “This place gives new meaning to the room with a view idea,” he said.

  The tiny restaurant at the casino had massive floor to ceiling windows. The reflection of the blue sky and bright white clouds on the mirror smooth lake created an optical illusion of infinity. Jasmine and Will stood before the window for a long time in one of those rare moments in life when reality falls away and you can feel the life force in someone else.

  “I think I’ll clone you,” he said, ruining the moment.

  “You can have this table just here,” the stout young Chemuevi Indian girl said as she showed them to a table next to the window. She had long black hair with lovely beadwork barrettes, and a small tattoo on her back. Jasmine leaned over slightly to see if she could make out the tattoo. It was a Germanic cross, with the words West Coast Choppers.

  “Can I have two milkshakes with my Huevos Rancheros?” Roy asked.

  “Sure you can, Roy,” Jasmine said.

  Roy didn’t rattle his rattle until he sat down, then he shook it furiously.

  “Ooii!” the waitress screamed, stopping suddenly. The room became still. Roy jumped up and yelled, “It’s just me, and I’m not a rattlesnake!”

  The subdued ripple of laughter subsided quickly as the waitress walked off, looking sternly at Roy.

  “That’s not funny, Roy,” Jasmine said.

  “Yes it is! Yes it is!” Roy squealed. He was beginning to experience bursts of hyperactive behavior that alarmed Jasmine.

  “I’d like to see some thyroid levels on him,” Jasmine said.

  “Probably slightly elevated,” Will said, taking time to look down Jasmine’s bodice. “I know the feeling.”

  Roy began playing drums with two spoons on the table and rocking his head back and forth. His eyes were bright now, and his hair was beginning to grow. His eyes no longer bulged and his face was beginning to fill out. Then it struck Jasmine. His skin was not only shining, he had a slight tan, and the bones of his elbows were no longer visible. For a moment, she saw him as a healthy, normal eight-year old. She looked at his skin for a long time, surprised to feel a slight pang of envy, as she looked at the wrinkles and aging spots on her hands.

  “Marjorie’s a lot of fun,” he said unexpectedly. “And she knows how to deliver the mail.”

  Jasmine was thinking the same thing. “Marjorie’s therapy is working perfectly. I think we did the right thing, locking the telomerase gene down.”

  “You’ve got a year, tops,” he said. “Then you’ll have to go all the way.”

  “I think we can do it. I worked out most of the gene list before they shut down the 9900. That’ll be the big hold up, getting enough modeling power and enough search time,” Jasmine replied.

  “Maybe you’ll get the 9900 back,” he said, quickly ordering.

  “Victor said they wanted a clean break, and money doesn’t seem to be an issue with them. We could not interest them in a spin-off. They just want to own the telomerase IP for the sake of owning it,” Jasmine said.

  “Adding an additional cancer checkpoint was a good idea. Marjorie has been working on that for a long time. I doubt if you’ll see many pre-cancerous endothelial cells when you look at his blood vessels,” Will said.

  “I hope he lives,” Jasmine said quietly.

  “So do I, and… so do others,” Will said, stroking the skin on his arm.

  “I don’t really know what I’m getting involved with, do I?” Jasmine asked, looking directly at Will.

  “Sure you do. We are simply delivering the future about forty years early, and we are bringing forth what is inside us, which we have to do. We do not have a choice. We are inquisitive, driven, infatuated gamblers, and we cannot help ourselves. It’s that simple.” Will turned in his chair to watch a boat drifting about fifty-yards out on the lake.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?” Jasmine asked finally.

  “Sure I can, but I won’t. In this world, everything is the exact opposite of the academic world. We don’t hang everything we’re doing on the clothesline. We trade information for things we need, and we tell other people only what they need to know. Right now you don’t need to know much, and I don’t need to tell you much.”

  “I don’t think I can adjust to that,” Jasmine said.

  “Sure you can. Just do what you’re good at. Work up a gene-based regeneration system that works. Work out the expression cascades, the regulatory loops, and design the gene cluster that will give us the exact proteins. Then you’ll have something to trade.” Will looked at her, finally touching her hand.

  “Who are you referring to as us?” Jasmine asked.

  “Walter, me, and a few very smart, worthwhile cheerleaders,” Will said.

  “I’ll trade you something you’re going to need, a reliable stem cell engine, stock or high-performance.” Will watched Roy wolf down his huge plate of Huevos Rancheros. “Maybe high-performance,” he added, laughing his nervous laugh again.

  “Can I have another milkshake?” Roy asked.

  “Another one?” Jasmine asked.

  “That’s only two!” Roy said excitedly, rattling his rattle under the table.

  The waitress came over slowly and looked at Roy very carefully, watching him scrape the last of the milkshake out of the steel tumbler. “You are a very pesky boy,” she said.

  “How did Marjorie’s moonshine session go?” Jasmine asked.

  “Great. She made a new friend and left on a romantic holiday,” Will said, shifting in his chair, removing a small device from his pocket.

  “When did she drive back?” Jasmine said, puzzled by the small device.

  “She didn’t. She flew,” he said, touching the device to the window.

  “To Vegas,” Jasmine asked.

  “No, to Phoenix,” Will said, scribbling on a napkin.

  “She flew to Phoenix? Why?” Jasmine asked.

  “Well, she didn’t exactly fly, she choppered. I think she’s still there,” Will said, intently watching the boat.

  “Walter?” Jasmine asked.

  “Yeah, she and Walter hit it off big time,” he said.

  “I can see that, I guess,” Jasmine said, suddenly worried about the complexity of the work ahead. “Will, could I talk you into coming up and helping us design the regulatory gene expression controls?” Jasmine asked.

  Will tapped the little box and a red meter started moving. “No, this is as far into California as I go, unless, that is, you get your hands on a 9900,” he said, suddenly placing the napkin in front of her with the words, OUR CONVERSATION IS BEING MONITORED.

  Jasmine carefully mouthed the word, WHY?

  Will penciled the words, HARD TO SAY, on the napkin. Then he laughed hysterically, turning heads throughout the room. “It seems everyone wants to know what I’m thinking these days,” he said, standing up and waving at the boat, which slowly powered off and away.

  Roy left for the bathroom, leaving them alone for the first time.

  “What does the stem cell therapy feel like?” Jasmine asked softly.

  “Like the worlds’ greatest vitamins, times a factor of about ten,” Will said.

  “Lots of energy?” Jasmine asked.

  “The skeletal aches disappear, joints smooth out, skin gets soft again, and you get unbelievably horny,” Will said looking at her.

  “Testosterone levels rise?” Jasmine said slowly.

  “Among other things,” Will said, reaching under the table and pulling her hand to his lap.

  Will’s erection was so hard the cotton material of his khaki pants was smooth. Jasmine was completely blindsided, and swept away in a lost moment of confusion. Something deep inside her took over, completely, and moved her hand slowly, tracing the bulge with her fingertips. The emotion and desire was overwhelming. She closed her eyes for a long moment, swept away in a surge of desire, love, aban
don, and fear. “Will, Will… this is, is…,”

  She looked at Will with her eyes barely open, meeting the intense force in his eyes as carefully as possible, but the vast power of desire between herself and Will pulled her eyes into his, and electrified her with the mystical energy of love, welding all of her molecules to his, sweeping her away on a breathtaking flight.

  “Will, I, I don’t know what to do about this,” Jasmine said softly.

  “Don’t do anything,” Will said stroking the back of her hand.

  “I am very married to Earl. I love him very much,” Jasmine said, her voice cracking.

  “That’s a good thing,” he said. “And I feel a magical uncontrollable love for you, and I always have. That’s also a good thing.”

  “I wish, sometimes I wish, there was a way for us.”

  “Maybe there will be,” Will said, pushing his fingers between the joints of her hand.

  “Lady, Lady! Your boy, he is hurt!” The waitress rushed up, almost catching them.

  Jasmine stared blankly for a long few seconds, until the waitress leaned down to her face.

  “Lady, your boy, he is hurt outside!”

  Jasmine leaped up and followed the waitress outside to the concrete sidewalk that led to the marina. Roy was lying on his back, holding his leg and crying loudly.

  “Roy! What happened?” Jasmine asked.

  “I was just running, and I fell, and now my leg hurts!” Roy cried, holding his rapidly swelling knee. “It really, really hurts!”

  Will appeared next to her with a plastic bag of ice. “You’re going to see a lot of this. The connective tissue is the last to respond. His muscles are stronger than his ligaments, and he can’t help but run. This looks like a bad ligament tear.”

  They carefully laid Roy down on the floor of the boat, packing his knee with ice and towels. Jasmine was amazed at how much weight he had put on in three weeks. “We’re taking you home now Roy.”

  “Am I going to die now?” he asked, innocently.

  “No, you’re not going to die now. This is just a little hurt. Your medicine will make this feel better really soon,” she said, as he fell asleep holding her hand. Jasmine looked out at the dark green lake as the boat picked up speed and reached for Will’s hand, which was soft and shining.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “It works, it really works!” Marjorie said, as she ran through the MRI images on her new computer console in the basement of her house. Earl excitedly faded the overlays from the post treatment views over the baseline images, which clearly showed the dramatic changes in Roy’s body.

  “Most of the stem cells went to the bone, heart, and skin, so we injected another thirty-million directly into his pulmonary artery and kidneys. We are hoping the new lung fibroblasts will help him cope with the upsurge in blood flow and his kidneys will be able to handle the load of cell debris. So far, he can breathe normally, with just a little chest wall pain,” Earl said, sounding like an excited child.

  Earl flipped through his notes quickly. “The effect of the telomerase treatment on his circulatory system was truly astonishing. It looks like the nano balls worked as advertised and delivered the gene patch in almost all the cells in the blood vessels. The inner lining of the vessels all show almost normal thickness and elasticity already, and the leakage in his capillaries has dropped off to nothing in less than four weeks.”

  “I knew it would work! I wanted to try it twenty years ago!” Marjorie roared now, quickly using the measuring tool on the ventricle wall.

  Jasmine watched Earl’s face closely. He was tanned, relaxed and smiling. “We made biopsies on two veins in each leg and found normal telomere lengths in the inner lining and no pre-cancerous cells at all. Your addition of double checkpoints prevented the development of any pre-cancerous cells. Marjorie, if you were a basketball player that would be a forty point game!”

  “Madam Marjorie, to you,” she said, impishly.

  Jasmine sat next to Earl and studied the MRI images as they appeared on the high-resolution displays. She was more interested in Marjorie, who looked sensational. Her skin virtually glowed, and her movements were fluid and graceful. She laughed constantly, and ran her fingers around the top of her pink sweatpants, then pulled them out to her side and let the elastic band snap as she talked.

  “Looks like we timed the saturation of the blood vessel walls perfectly,” Marjorie said, looking carefully at the MRI images. “We got lucky.”

  Jasmine reached out and touched the back of Marjorie’s hand. “Looks like you got lucky,” she said.

  “You can say that again! What a trip! I racked up three personal bests on my fantasy quest, got seduced by one of the wildest and richest men in the world, and took a leap into the age of garage science, all in three short weeks!” Marjorie was a bundle of energy, smiling broadly, suddenly pulling herself up to an upright posture and breathing in deeply.

  “Why do you do that?” Jasmine asked.

  “I don’t know. Stretching just feels good,” Marjorie replied. “That’s how I’m living these days. If it feels good, I do it.”

  “Your skin is beautiful,” Jasmine remarked.

  “Isn’t it? Will’s stem cells seem to think a woman’s skin comes first, and you know, I agree with that! My backaches are gone, and my knees aren’t stiff anymore. I can see much better at night, and… well, I’m just a lovin’ oven!” she said, her eyes glowing.

  “You’ve always been a lovin’ oven, Marjorie,” Jasmine replied.

  “Not quite like this!” Marjorie said, a little too loudly, doing a bad Go Go dance routine. Jasmine could not stop laughing as Marjorie ground out her dance.

  “Do you think we can do it?” Jasmine asked.

  “Sure. Diffracting the proteins at Berkeley and the new cross species in-silico testing almost guarantees it. We’ll miss a few tricks, but yeah, we’ll get it,” she said, arching her back and turning at the waist.

  “Will calculates we have a year to finish the rest of Roy’s treatment,” Jasmine said.

  “If we’re lucky, he’ll start to grow quickly now, and will almost certainly injure himself. It’s a toss up which organ will fail from the increased blood flow, probably the liver. Earl and I worked out a strict diet for him, but he’s so ravenous, he’s going to eat like a horse. We need to get going right away. What are you going to do for a rockcrusher?” she asked.

  “Good question,” Jasmine replied, watching the first fog of the summer roll in around the Golden Gate Bridge. “That’s a very good question. I think I’ll drive down the coast this afternoon.”

  Gazos Creek State Beach was Jasmine’s favorite spot on the San Mateo coast. The white and black lighthouse on Pigeon Point reminded her of New England, and the gently rolling dark green fields of artichokes went for miles. The north wind usually howled down this beach all summer, but today it was warm, with a thin overcast and just a gentle breeze out of the west.

  “They look just like me!” Rammy said excitedly, walking right up to the sleeping sea elephants. You sure they’re alive?” he said slowly leaning over until his face was just a few inches from the eye, which opened slowly. “Room service, did you order the sushi plate?” he asked, as the huge grey sea elephant arched its head back and bellowed, turning its back to Rammy.

  “Okay, so no tip! He said, turning back to Jasmine. “I know I have relatives here somewhere!”

  “Don’t get between them!” Jasmine yelled to Rammy.

  “No low-carb diets for these guys!” Rammy yelled, struggling through the deep sand.

  “They don’t floss either,” Jasmine added, as Rammy sat down in the folding camp chair.

  “Yeah, that breath, it is mackerel plaque to the extreme! Makes you want to skip the kissy stuff, doesn’t it? Great spot, Jasmine, how about some milk and cookies?” Rammy said, cleaning the sea spray from his glasses.

  “Marjorie said she overcooked these just a little,” Jasmine said, handing Rammy a round metal cookie box.
/>   “I cannot work under these conditions!” Rammy yelled in a shrill high voice, biting into the purple brownie. He looked up at the sky, hunched his shoulders together, and shook his head side to side, the vibrating movement traveling down his body. “Maybe, just maybe, I can.”

  “I thought you’d like this place,” Jasmine said, watching a sailboat offshore tacking in the light air.

  “I’ve never been here. Majors Beach is about as far north as I go. I never surfed much,” he added, giggling quietly.

  “Roy is doing much better,” Jasmine said.

  “So I hear,” he said, breaking a brownie in half.

  “We have less than a year to finish his treatment, which means I have an enormous amount of burn time to design the synthetic genes and model the proteins,” Jasmine said, again thinking through the agonizing decision to treat Roy.

  “What if you don’t make it?” Rammy said.

  “He will almost certainly die,” Jasmine said, trying to sound dispassionate.

  “Now that’s what I call a deadline,” he said, in an old Jewish man’s voice, tossing a piece of brownie to a seagull.

  “I have to have something very fast, at least a Cray SV-1.”

  “It won’t run the Oracle 10G support vectors fast enough. That is why Fujitsu built the 9900 Mega Cluster. Modeling proteins was like playing tennis with a frying pan before that beauty came along. We could have saved the world a hell of a lot of burn time if the greed heads let us post our analogs.”

  “I forgot about that. That was Victor’s first call as CEO,” Jasmine said.

  “Hell, we were years ahead of the massive parallel platforms they’re using now.” Rammy waited for the seagull to circle back, and then he tossed it a piece of brownie.

  “What do we need, Rammy, money?” Jasmine said.

  “Buying one won’t work. It’d take you at least a year to get a license for one here, then another year to actually get one, if they give you one,” he said, spreading a blanket down in the sand.