by Jamie Metzl
I tap off the call as Maurice orders the ambulance on his radio.
“Confirmed. Ambulance will arrive in seven minutes,” the dispatcher says.
Maurice hits the gas and U-turns the car back toward the cave entrance.
“Wait,” I yell, opening the door. “You go. I need to wait for the response.”
Maurice slams on the brakes, then looks at me and nods.
As he drives away, I feel the dark of the windy plains, a cold aloneness, seeping into me. I cradle my u.D and right wrist in my left hand as if I can rub it into action. The silent u.D mocks me with indifference. The seconds tick away. “Come on,” I murmur, hoping against hope that the Council of Elders is deep in discussion right now. I have no way of knowing. I hear the siren growing louder, then watch the ambulance jet through the broken gate into the cave. The u.D doesn’t peep.
Self-doubt begins to overtake me. How stupid to send Noland away. Was he Toni’s only hope? Did my selfish anger put her in even greater danger than she’s already in? I step in front of the ambulance rolling back out of the entrance with my hands up, then rush around and jump in the back. Chou and an EMT are kneeling over Toni in the cramped space jammed full with the machines from the operating room inside the caves.
“We’ve kept her hooked up to everything,” Chou says as I maneuver toward Toni. “Hopefully we can figure this out at Truman.”
I blanch. “Didn’t you say you had a plan B?” Chou asks, the nervousness registering on his face.
My silence hangs painfully, overcoming even the clamor of the sirens around us.
“I-I …” I stammer, feeling the full weight of my doubt descend upon me.
And then my u.D vibrates. The message flashes across its small screen:
Received. Considered. Confirmed.
56
The room is silent but for the quiet whir of the transfusion machine and the steady beep of the biorhythm monitor. The Hewitts stand nervously beside the bed. My efforts to explain what’s going on to them has only made them more nervous. Chou is busy prepping for the procedure. All I can do is stare at Toni. She lies peacefully, but I have no idea what damage may be visiting her on a cellular level.
It’s been twelve hours since we arrived at the hospital. Those twelve hours have been forever, only punctuated by the series of short data blasts on my u.D.
Cargo arriving Wheeler Airport 9 p.m. CST; arrange pickup. Maintain strict operational security. No media coverage whatsoever. Minimal contact with external medical personnel.
I had Joseph pick them up.
The two women march in purposefully, already in scrubs. Each pulls a rolling case. They both appear to be in their forties and in impeccable physical condition. The taller one has medium-length blonde hair pulled into a bun and razor-like features. The shorter one has a darker complexion and deep, penetrating brown eyes. Every aspect of their demeanor indicates they are here to do a job and nothing else. I stand to greet them but Joseph signals me back.
The women acknowledge me, Chou, and the Hewitts, then set down their cases and begin unpacking their supplies, placing a metal box like the ones used to carry transplant organs on a table beside the bed.
“Is that what I think—”
The taller woman’s stare cuts off my sentence.
“Please step outside while we prepare,” she says in a sharp accent I recognize as Hebrew. Her request to me and the Hewitts is really more of an order. “I will join you in a moment to explain the risks.”
The three of us hesitate before following the instructions. Something about the way she refers to “the risks” is deeply unsettling to me. The Hewitts sit in the waiting room of the hospital suite while I pace nervously. None of us speak.
About fifteen minutes later, the taller doctor steps out. “We believe the safest option that will cause her the least amount of systemic trauma is to push forward the transfusion using her most recent genetic materials—those taken when her eggs were extracted thirteen days ago. But this procedure has never been carried out before. We have no way of reliably predicting the outcome.”
I gasp.
“Another possibility,” she continues, “is that the first cellular reversion will complete regardless of our actions and she could be physically younger with no knowledge of the past four years. This could happen if her cells have passed a point of no return in the reversion process. It is also very possible that something else could happen which we cannot predict.”
Every muscle in my body tenses. “You can’t say anything more certain than that?”
“The human brain consists of hundreds of billions of neurons with almost a hundred trillion synapses connecting them. This is extremely complicated work. Now if you will please excuse me.”
Elizabeth Hewitt steps forward as the taller doctor is turning back. She places her hand on the doctor’s arm in a way that reminds me of Toni and looks warmly into the doctor’s eyes. “Thank you for being here,” she says.
The doctor’s iciness shows a first hint of thaw. “We will do our best.”
The wait is excruciating while the procedure rolls on in the next room. We watch on the monitor as the doctors carefully calibrate the transfusion machine and biorhythm monitor and exchange a few words with Chou in English. I don’t understand all that is happening there but keep my eyes locked on the screen until I feel the vibration of Sierra’s message on my wrist.
Arriving.
Per my instructions, she walks in alone, her posture as erect as her aged bones can support. A large scarf is wrapped around her head. I’d known when I contacted Sierra that I only had a small window to fulfill my promise; the unmarked SBN plane parked at Wheeler Airport the only ticket to make it possible.
Katherine Hart takes off the scarf and looks deeply into my eyes.
“I gave you my word I would find your husband and let you be with him again,” I say.
“I had a feeling about you,” she says tenderly, taking my hand.
I smile as much as the fear still surging through me allows. “What I’m about to offer may not be exactly what you had in mind. Can I start at the beginning?”
Two hours later, she has journeyed through a lifetime that has somehow, somewhere, been lost. Her facial expressions have traveled the full spectrum, back and forth, between the poles of horror and joy, understanding and consternation, love and loss, life and death. “He was, he is, the love of my life, and I will always miss him,” she says softly, “but I’d much rather have him where he is right now, doing what he loves, than dead or dying or lost.” Her words float in the profound silence. “I only hope he’s not alone.”
My mind wanders to Wolfson and Margolies and Singer and the others, to Toni in the operating room just beside me. What does it mean to be alone? What type of connection does it take to break that spell? “That’s why I’ve invited you here. Can I ask you an impossible question?”
“Ben used to say no questions are impossible; it’s just the answers are sometimes harder to find.”
I lay out the idea.
“Oh my, that is an impossible question.”
“I promised I would bring you together. I’m offering you the chance to be together for decades more, maybe forever. There’s only enough catalytic compound left for one more reversion and I believe it should be used on you, to bring you and Ben together, but only if that’s what you want. I’m so sorry to rush you, but you’ve got about four hours to make your decision and you would have to give me your sacred word this would only be between us.”
“What would I tell the children, the grandchildren, the …”
“You’d have to figure that out.”
“And if I decide to do it?”
“I’ll need you to let me know within three hours and be at Wheeler Airport in four.”
Katherine Hart looks deep into my eyes as if, through me, imagining another world, another life, a future. Then she stands and rushes out the door.
Three and a half nervous hours later
, the tall doctor invites us in. It’s been a nearly six-hour procedure and everything looks exactly as it did in the beginning. Toni is still lying inert on her back, eyes closed, not moving, the blood surging in and out of the transfusion machine tubes. Watching her, I feel as if the life is being sucked out of me as well. The shorter doctor gives us specific instructions for what we need to do to care for her over the next five days until the parabiotic transfusion process is complete.
“If you need us,” she says, “Mr. Azadian knows how to reach us.”
I don’t want to leave Toni’s side, but I dart out to ambush the doctors as they prepare to leave.
“Impossible,” the exasperated taller one replies to my request. “Dr. Heller’s second vial looks like it’s lost, we’ve just used a dose to restore your friend, and this is how we should use what might be the last existing dose of the catalytic compound?”
I shrug.
“Anyway, a decision like that is not for us to make.”
“I understand,” I say, tapping my u.D. The ten-digit number flashes for five seconds on my u.D’s monitor before disappearing.
I place the call.
Beep.
I know I’m pushing my luck, but it wasn’t me who made this mess in the first place. “Benjamin Hart never volunteered for this. You took him. Maybe his and Katherine’s last moment in the hospice would have been forever for them. They never had it. Now you’ve got to help make this right. People cannot be pawns, whatever the stakes, and a classically trained neurobiologist wouldn’t be a terrible addition to the SBN team. I don’t mean to be a pain,” I add, “but if this doesn’t happen I would consider it a significant blow to the deep relationship of trust between us and would need to reconsider my commitments accordingly.”
I understand I may be playing the same game as SBN, deciding who lives forever based on my own sense of what is good. But life is a balance and sometimes actions require reactions to keep it.
In ten minutes, the acceptance of my “request” flashes across the screen for the three of us to see.
“This is a mistake,” the taller doctor says.
I stare at her for a moment longer than comfortable. “It’s a crazy little thing called love.”
The two women shake their heads.
“Meshuggah,” the shorter one grumbles.
57
The next four days are a continuous flow of meetings and updates, with Maurice, Martina, Sierra, Joseph, and Toni’s parents joining me in my constant vigil over Toni. We even infiltrate lovable Dreyfus in a rolling suitcase, hoping his presence might bring positive energy to the room.
But Toni still lies motionless and unconscious. The only signs of life are her slow breath and the whirl of her blood passing through the tubes. Not knowing all that’s happened to her cells, her history, her health, fills me with constant dread.
“The FBI and NIH are now all over this,” Maurice tells me during one of his visits, “and KCPD is on it full tilt. Noland and six of his colleagues are in custody, all of them cooperating fully to try to save themselves from the death penalty for the murder of my two men. It looks like Noland was the one masterminding the cancer program and then manipulating the data from the early trials after it started coming back less promisingly than expected.”
“So why fake it?”
“Once he discovered Heller had figured out how to reverse people’s ages, Noland knew that breakthrough was potentially far bigger than a cure for cancer could ever be. His idea was to use the cancer announcement to drive up Santique’s stock price and then leverage the higher valuation to begin a massive roll up of all the technologies they’d need to bring age reversion to market. They knew Heller was hiding things from them, but they’d already built surveillance systems into Heller’s lab that tracked everything, even over the constant music Heller played trying to drown out their systems.”
“Except for inside the jellyfish room,” I say.
“Heller figured out they were getting his information, but he engineered that one room to be safe, divided up his files, and put the coded message in the dog’s DNA as a backup. He must have felt the noose was closing on him when he invited you and Toni into the lab.”
“He told us we’d come at a serendipitous moment. But why did they kill Heller?”
“Noland knew that Heller’s invention could make Santique the most powerful company in the world. At first, Noland wanted to do a deal with Heller guaranteeing Santique a monopoly on Heller’s work, but Heller told them to go to hell, that he’d only give the data to people he could trust. Noland’s thugs suspected that the formula for producing the catalytic compound, without which the reversion process could not work, had potentially been passed when you and Toni visited. They checked in on Heller after the two of you left to get him to talk and things got ugly. They snuck out the back door with the vial of Heller’s reversion formula when you started banging on Heller’s front door, but not before throwing his body into the jellyfish tank to try to cover their tracks. If we hadn’t broken in that day, we never would have found Heller’s body. Then they started tracking you and Toni, getting a lot of information from hacking your u.Ds.”
“I thought those things were supposed to be Silent Circle encrypted, unhackable.”
“Apparently not,” Maurice says. “That’s how they realized their tracks weren’t covered, why they destroyed Heller’s lab and went after the dog at Toni’s house.”
“Went after? They blew up the damn house. How did they—” My mind answers my question. “They heard my call to Franklin Chou about Sebastian?”
“Yes. And they thought they were protected after Heller’s lab was destroyed and the dog was incinerated, until they intercepted the message Toni left on your u.D saying she was remembering what Heller told her about how to find the catalytic compound formula. They were desperate to get control of the formula before anyone else did.”
The pieces start to fit together in my head. The electrocorticography helmet in Heller’s operating room, Hart and Wolfson’s memories being recorded when they were being reverted to earlier ages. “But they knew she wouldn’t tell them, so they reverted Toni to try to capture her memories.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Maurice says. “That formula was the key to everything. They had a small dose of the catalytic compound they’d stolen from Heller’s lab, good enough for maybe one reversion. The compound itself could not be reverse engineered, so they desperately needed the formula to make it possible to bring the reversion process to an industrial scale. They knew that if Toni told you and the catalytic compound formula got to SBN and others, the monopoly would be broken. Their only option was to revert Toni before she could tell anyone and try to download what Heller told her in the jellyfish room. With so much at stake, they decided to move up the announcement of their cancer program as a precaution.”
I feel a chill in my spine. “And if that’s why they were reverting her, it’s hard to believe they would have just sent her back home four years younger once they were done.”
Maurice purses his lips. “That’s why we’re charging them with the attempted murder of Toni in addition to the murders of Heller and my men and everything else.”
I put my hands over my face. Maybe we did save Toni from a worse fate, but her new reality remains deeply uncertain.
“Downloadable memory, the damn scientific age,” Maurice mumbles, trying to ease the tension. “I’m probably going to need my son to explain it all to me.”
I look up and smile fleetingly. Downloadable memory. Neural computing. Artificial intelligence. Life. Death. Immortality. Maurice is finally looking at the big picture, but that picture may be too big these days for any of us to accurately see. His son’s philosophy books are as good a place to start as any. “What will happen to Noland?”
“Life, for sure,” Maurice says. “I’d be happier with execution. But his complete cooperation now will probably spare him. Of course, your article is confusing things.”
“Don’t play stupid with me, Dikran. Just because your name isn’t on the byline doesn’t mean you’re not behind it.”
I shrug.
“Joseph Abraham and Sierra Halley are getting a lot of attention around town. Hell, around the world. The mania about defeating cancer and the possibility of someday defeating mortality is starting to swirl across the globe like a virus. The immortality tidal wave looks like it’s only beginning.”
“It’s strange,” I say, the errant thought darting through my brain, “people waste so much time in their actual lives but still can’t resist the drive to live forever.”
Maurice shakes his head. “Of course, Senator King is organizing hearings, trying to blame President Lewis and Jack Alvarez for letting this happen under their watch, asking why they let the big health companies get so politically powerful. The parties are rushing to give back the political contributions they’ve received from Santique. People are amazed that anyone in the media has finally taken on the health companies and are calling Abraham and Halley the next Dikran Azadians.”
I appreciate Maurice’s efforts to lighten things up and try to play along. “I’m not that confident in Dikran 1.0, Maurice.”
“But I’ve read all the stories multiple times and I still get the feeling it’s not all there, that you’re influencing things behind the scenes, protecting people by withholding critical pieces of information.”
“Well, I didn’t write those stories, but that’s a very interesting theory.”
Maurice lifts an eyebrow before patting me on the shoulder and leaving the room.
I return to the procedure room and resume my vigil. Closing my eyes a moment, I picture the SBN ship floating on, imagine Katherine Hart lying motionless in one of its operating rooms with the tubes of blood going in and out of her arms, the history of the last forty years of her life vanishing and a new future opening. I open my eyes and see my story, the story of my life, of my future, of a tomorrow I no longer dread but am willing to embrace as a treasure trove of shifting, exciting, graying possibilities, resting in the body lying before me in this painfully silent room.