Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original

by Various Authors

  The one silver lining, if you want to call it that, of this universality of illness was that because everyone was either sick or knew intimately someone who was sick, there was immense political will for both short and long term solutions to the problems Haden’s presented. And in terms of political impetus to find solutions, no one was more motivated than the President himself.

  Wesley Auchincloss:

  After three weeks it was clear that Margie wasn’t coming out of it. Doctors elsewhere were reporting other patients by the thousands with the same issues she had, so we knew that what was happening to her wasn’t isolated or unusual. And it wasn’t something we could keep hidden from the press or the American people, either. It was around this time that the term “Haden’s syndrome” started to be used in reference to the disease, particularly the third stage of it. We tried to keep that from the President as long as we could, but that was a futile gesture. He heard it.

  Dr. Harvey and her staff confirmed by MRIs and other tests that Margie was awake and conscious, so the President spent much of his time with her at Walter Reed, talking to her and reading those mystery novels she had as her guilty pleasure. Kenny Lamb finally had to pull him aside and tell him that despite his personal pain, the country needed a President, and that President needed to be seen leading and reassuring the country in this moment of crisis. When Kenny said this, the President gave him a look that, if I had to guess, communicated supreme apathy about the needs of the rest of the country. But after a minute he nodded slowly and told Kenny that the next morning he’d be ready to resume full activity as President.

  Col. Lydia Harvey:

  I remember that the President stayed up with the First Lady that entire night. I suggested to him that both he and the First Lady needed their rest, but he said, more politely than I suspect he really wished to, that he was the President and that no one could stop him from speaking to his wife. I told the medical staff to give him and the First Lady privacy and to intrude only if absolutely necessary.

  Nevertheless around midnight I came into the room just before heading home myself. The President was sitting on his wife’s bed, facing away from me, holding her hand. I could hear him talking to her quietly. Most of it I couldn’t make out, but once or twice I heard him say, “Tell me what I should do. Tell me what I need to do, Margie. Tell me.”

  It was a strangely intimate moment and I felt that I had intruded on something that the President did not intend nor would want me to see. I slipped out of the room before he could notice I was there, waited a moment and then knocked on the door before entering a second time, to give the President time to prepare himself. The Secret Service agents guarding the door gave me a look when I did this but as far as I know they kept quiet about it, too. I think they understood what had happened.

  Wesley Auchincloss:

  Kenny and I came into the Oval Office at 8am the next morning and were surprised that the President already had the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader of the Senate in there with him. We had been under the impression that the meeting would be the usual agenda setter between me, Kenny, and the President. The looks we got from every other member of the meeting suggested to us that they were at least as surprised to be at the meeting as we were. We found out after the meeting that the President called each of them personally at around 5am and told them to be in the Oval Office or face the consequences, “the consequences” being unspecified but dire. He didn’t call me or Kenny, I suppose, because he knew we were coming anyway.

  When we were all there, the President looked at each of us and said something along the lines of, I’ll make this simple. We’re going to find out what this disease is, we’re going to cure it and we’re going to help the people who are locked in their bodies find a way to get out, because we’re the greatest nation in the world, and if we could build the atom bomb and put a man on the moon, we sure as hell can do this.

  And then Speaker Cortez said, in that way of hers, “Well, Mr. President, that’s going to cost money.” The President said that he didn’t care. [Senate Majority Leader] Caleb Waters reminded him that he’d been elected on a platform of slashing taxes and cutting government expenditures. The President stared straight at Waters and said, and this a direct quote, “That was then.” Waters opened his mouth to say something else and the President said to him that he needed to listen very carefully, this was going to happen and that if anyone got in the way of it happening, regardless of party, regardless of position, he would screw them into the ground so hard that they would end up ass-first in China.

  Which would have been an amusing way of putting it except that I have never, not before or since, seen the President as deadly serious as he was being at that exact moment. Waters shut his mouth and waited for what the President had to say next.

  And what he said next was simple. He said to Waters and Cortez that as far as he was concerned this initiative was the sole task of the federal government from that point forward. How they wanted to get it done in their respective chambers was up to them but they had three months and no more to get a bipartisan bill on his desk, one that had more than two-thirds support in both chambers.

  Left unsaid was what would happen if the bill failed to materialize in the appointed time. I think in her autobiography Cortez said she thought the President was hinting that martial law was not out of the question. There’s not much that I would agree with Cortez on, politically or otherwise, but I think she was spot on with this one. To be blunt, the President was not fucking around with this one. It wasn’t political, it was personal.

  Duane Holmes:

  It got done. It nearly killed everyone in Congress, and everyone in Congress ended up wanting to kill everyone else, but two weeks before the deadline the President had the Haden Research Initiative Act on his desk. 300 billion dollars allocated for medical and technological research and treatment for that first year, officially, and unofficially, whatever it cost to get things moving. It ended up costing three trillion dollars by the end of it. That’s a hell of a lot of money.

  It got done for two reasons. One, there wasn’t anyone in the US who wasn’t affected by the syndrome. Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, hippie and gun nut, atheist and evangelical, it didn’t matter. Someone in your family got sick. One of your friends got sick. One of your co-workers got sick. You got sick.

  Two, and I say this as a member of the loyal opposition, President Haden simply would not take no for an answer. He worked to pack the Congressional hearings with witnesses who would appeal on both sides of the aisle—the day [former NBA star and Basketball Hall of Famer] Marcus Shane came to testify I don’t think I’ve seen so many grown men and women act like children scrambling for autographs. And then Shane talked about how the disease had locked in his kid and I saw [Senate Appropriation Committee Chairman] Owen Webster—that heartless bastard!—openly sobbing into his microphone. That’s when any doubt I had that this thing was going to get done evaporated.

  There were a few holdouts. David Abrams, who was then a backbencher representative, made a lot of noise on the radio talk show circuit about the cost and the threat of new taxes and the expansion of big government and so on, and even took a few swipes at the President, despite them being of the same party. I understand Haden let it slide by until Abrams made a crack about the First Lady to a Tulsa talk show host. By the end of the day, as I understand it, Abrams was having a very intimate discussion with the NSA, and they showed him some pictures they had or something, and then that was the last anyone heard of Abrams until the act passed. He even voted for it and everything.

  Thomas Stevenson:

  I can’t say that I have any recollection of the NSA ever meeting with David Abrams at the time. You might ask him. I would be interested in what he has to say on the matter.

  Neal Joseph:

  Look. At the end of the day, it came down to this: the President wanted
his wife back. He was willing to do anything to make that happen. And he was President of the United States, which meant he was able to do anything to make it happen. As a side effect, millions would ultimately benefit from the decision, but make no mistake. Benjamin Haden was being purely, entirely and unabashedly selfish. He loved his wife, he was lost without her, and he wanted her back. End of story.

  Could you blame him for it? Could anyone blame him for it?

  PART THREE: THE MOON SHOT

  Irving Bennett:

  The Haden Research Initiative Act was sold to the public as a “moon shot”—as in, we went from Kennedy saying we would go to the moon to Armstrong setting foot on it in nine years because we decided as a nation that we would, and we put the resources and willpower to work. President Haden made it clear that he wanted the same unity of purpose here. And of course everyone got behind it because the syndrome touched everyone’s life to a greater or lesser extent.

  But it didn’t change the fact that the first year of the HRIA was complete chaos. National unity of purpose is fine, but when it comes to spreading $300 billion around, logistics and a solid plan is better. And it was clear that at least at the outset, no one had a plan on how to apportion the money, to allocate resources for research and development, or to set concrete goals. The US government basically threw all that money into the air and yelled “go” to whoever grabbed it.

  Haden and the rest of the government quickly realized that, and Haden in particular was incensed. He may have forced the creation of one of the biggest social programs in the history of the United States, but he still had “skinflint Republican” in his bones. The idea that his signature legislative achievement would be seen as a call to slop the pigs was something that outraged him. He sicced [Attorney General Gayle] Garcia on several companies and C-suite executives—including ones who had contributed to his election, an unheard of thing in any political era—and eventually people took the hint.

  By the end of the first year things had settled out into four main buckets. One was simply for the medical maintenance of all the people who were afflicted, who weren’t already covered by insurance, plus more federal backstopping for the insurance companies, who were screaming bloody murder about costs. Of the three left, one was for research into a vaccine, one for research into the brain, and the one for mobility and community research. Find a cure, communicate with the victims, get them reintegrated back into the world. It was the brain research that took off first.

  Ida Garza, Former Deputy Programs Coordinator, HRIA, Department of Health and Human Services

  My job was to coordinate research across several different private companies, the CDC, and other divisions of Health and Human Services and various public and private universities, with a focus on brain research. And it was a nightmare. Primarily because each of these groups were used to shielding their intellectual property from the outside world, until such time as they could file patents or otherwise move to protect their work.

  The thing with the HRIA was that as a condition of receiving funding, all the work, including work in progress, had to be submitted to a searchable database so that everyone else receiving funding could see the work and use it to advance their own work—because above anything else, we had a mandate to get advances and therapies to the patients as quickly as possible. The HRIA still allowed for patent filings, but everything, everything, was cross-licensed for the length of the patent, for a statutory fee that went into effect only after a product went to market.

  This simply wasn’t the way things had ever been done before, and so I had to deal with CEOs and chairpeople calling me up and yelling at me that they were leaving money and profits on the table. I would remind them of just how much HRIA funding they were shoveling into their companies and that they knew what the conditions were on that money. They would respond with baffled silence. Occasionally one would threaten to go over my head and talk to the Secretary, or, God forbid, the President himself.

  I was secretly delighted when they would say that, because I had a standing order when that happened to refer them immediately to the White House, at which time the Chief of Staff would read them the riot act. A couple of times I understand the President himself got on the line to do the honors. I was never a huge fan of President Haden before the HRIA but I appreciated him after the fact, because he simply took no crap from anyone about how the HRIA was run. You opened up your research or you didn’t participate. And there was so much money involved that eventually everyone gave in.

  Sharing data that way was not really the optimal way of doing things. If any of us at HHS could have changed it, we would have done things Manhattan Project style, where we sent all the researchers into the desert together until they came up with things we could use. But this set-up allowed the communal effort to have at least a thin veneer of free enterprise, and that was politically important, considering the administration.

  And at the end of it all, it worked. The first neural networks came about because research on detecting brain activity by way of MRI and other external devices at Stanford was combined with physical deep brain stimulation research at the Cleveland Clinic by a scientist working at General Electric. If they hadn’t been able to see each other’s work, they all would have had to reinvent those particular wheels. This way the wheel only had to be invented once.

  Heng Chang, neural network developer, General Electric:

  Before Haden’s there was already a considerable amount of work being done in the field of directed brain imagery—using MRIs and other similar equipment to record and register when and how thoughts were being transmitted, and visualizing the brain as it responded to outside stimuli. At first for third-stage Haden’s patients, that’s how they communicated—sensors would be placed on their heads and scalps and we could very laboriously piece together their thoughts, sometimes just by running down the alphabet and having them think “yes” when we came to the letter they were thinking of. Spelling that way. Obviously that was a laborious process and not one that could be replicated for millions of Haden’s patients.

  When GE started researching Haden’s, we got access to the HRIA database and as I was going through it I became intrigued at some experiments the Cleveland Clinic was doing with very sensitive antenna-like filaments they were developing to track incipient seizures in epilepsy patients, with the idea of then applying deep brain stimulation to arrest the seizures before they began. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if the filaments could send as well as receive. You could use them to allow input from outside the body directly into the brain, and sent thoughts out the same way. Then I didn’t think about it again because I was working on another project entirely, and the Clinic’s work wasn’t on-point to that.

  But my subconscious mind must have been still thinking about it because about a week later I came flying out of a dead sleep with the idea of the neural network. It was like it just downloaded directly into my brain. My reaction to it was so strong that I sat straight up in bed and actually shouted—not “Eureka!” but just a really loud gasp. This turned out not to be a great thing, because my cat was sleeping on my chest and was so surprised that she ended up digging into my skin before running off the bed. I got out of bed, swabbed the blood off my chest, and then drove to work in the middle of the night to start modeling the network I thought of. I didn’t want to go back to sleep. If I did that, I was pretty sure I was going to lose it entirely.

  Ida Garza:

  Chang’s idea was brilliant. Every scientist, on staff and off, told me so. So we knew this was a direction we needed to go, and quickly. What we didn’t know was how much it would cost. There’s an old saying: “Fast. Good. Cheap. Pick two.” Meaning that you’d never get all three at once. We picked fast and good. We didn’t assume it would be cheap, which as it turns out was a good thing.

  Heng Chang:

  They told me years later that by the time we got the first fully functional neural network into production, we had burned throu
gh something like a hundred billion dollars developing, testing and manufacturing it. That’s a literally inconceivable amount of money to me. Certainly I never saw any of it, other than my salary at GE. But I did get on the cover of Time magazine and was a finalist for Person of the Year, so that made my mother proud.

  Irving Bennett:

  So Chang and his team developed the neural network, but one drawback they had was in its testing. They could model the networks in supercomputers which could create environments that superficially resembled the human brain, and those models got them something like eighty five to ninety percent of the way there. But at the end of the day, if you want to find out whether they work, you have to put the networks into an actual brain.

  And ultimately it has to be a human brain, for two reasons. One, because animals’ brains aren’t complex enough, and two, because an animal isn’t going to be able to talk to you about whether the network is functioning. There was also the catch that during the meningitis phase the Haden virus changed the structure and function of the brain so much that there was literally no useful analogue in the natural world for it. If you wanted to see how the networks worked in a Haden brain, you needed an actual Haden brain.

  Naturally, this created a moral and ethical issue. These first neural networks were both highly experimental and highly invasive—the work papers Chang and his crew published described how the filaments of the network would need to penetrate and migrate through the brain matter, essentially turning the brain into a massive pincushion, without any guarantee that the invasion of this artificial neural network wouldn’t kill or debilitate these Haden’s patients even more than they were.

  When I wrote up the stories on the work papers the families of Haden’s patients nearly rioted. They felt like their family members were about to be victimized a second time. President Haden had to cut short a trip to Indonesia to come back and deal with it. He was not happy about it, or with me. [New York Times Publisher] Bitsy Lapine called me into her office to let me know that the President had called and yelled at her about me for twenty minutes. Bitsy, bless her, eventually recited the First Amendment at him and hung up.