“Uh, Mister Stixrude, sir—this firm’s first product was that anti-toenail-fungus stuff, remember?”
“True. And that application was hardly life-altering or dramatic or even particularly noble. But it offered a cure for an actual disease, not some—some frivolous enhancement for a recreational pursuit.”
“You’re not saying that impotence isn’t a disease, are you? The AMA would certainly disagree.”
“All right, then, it’s a bona fide disease. But still, out of all the physiological problems that bedevil humanity and that are yet to tackle, it’s low on my personal list of issues.”
Jackmore made no reply to this statement, but merely looked at his elegant shoes and coughed discreetly.
Lothar was brought up sharply against his own words, forced to examine his own motives for rejecting Jackmore’s proposal out of hand. Was he subconsciously prejudiced against the notion solely because of his own private sexual abstinence? As one of the country’s wealthiest men, Lothar could surely have found a hundred floozies who would have been glad to offer sex in return for a pampered life. But he refused to follow such a mercenary route to sexual satisfaction, awaiting some moment when a woman would approach him with love in her eyes and heart. But his crippled appearance and time- consuming dedication to his work militated against any such love affair, leaving him a celibate monk of the labs. What good would a product like the hypothetical SEA’s Up! do him? Nothing. Yet was his own set of limitations reason to deny the rest of humanity such a boon, which they obviously craved?
Lothar was not convinced yet that Jackmore’s proposal had any merit. But it had suddenly become harder to argue against it on purely philosophical grounds.
“All right,” Lothar said, “maybe this could be a legitimate area of research. But you set the bar too high when you made the claim in your ad that any such agent would kick into gear at will. Do you have any notion of how complex the chain of events connected with human sexual response is? Why, the hormones alone—”
Jackmore jumped to his feet. “Doc, if there’s anyone who can make it work, it’s you! You provide the genius and I provide the flash. You’re the steak and I’m the sizzle. Once you start focusing on how to make this a reality, it’ll happen for sure. Wow, look at the time! I’d better leave now. I’ve got to email the members of the board of directors about this exciting new field the company is moving into.”
“Rand, no—”
But Jackmore was already heading toward the door. When he opened it, the figure of Dr. Mirelyis Sosa was revealed.
As usual, Mirelyis presented a studiously neutral countenance to the world, beneath her high-piled tawny hair. Tall and slim, alluringly streamlined, her complexion a Caribbean melange of genetic confluences, the woman struck mute notes of mixed anguish and desire in Lothar’s breast. Mirelyis had earned her doctorate in Castro’s Cuba and achieved a sterling international reputation in the dictator’s bioengineering industry. (Perhaps, thought Lothar, those authoritarian conditions had taught her to shield her innermost thoughts from the world.) When Castro had died and Cuba had become a territory of the USA on a legal par with Puerto Rico, Mirelyis had taken the first opportunity to relocate to America.
At the sight of the beautiful researcher, Jackmore ramped up his unbearable charm even higher. “Ah, Dr. Sosa, you make that simple white lab coat look like a Zuzul original gown.”
Mirelyis’s only reaction to this compliment was a dangerous intensification of the gleam in her obsidian eyes. She marched past the undaunted Jackmore, who smiled, shrugged for Lothar’s benefit, then made a graceful exit, closing the door behind him.
Mirelyis wasted no time with ceremony. Her impatience and frustration evidenced itself in the slight resurgence of her normally suppressed accent. “Dr. Stixrude, I demand to know why you turned down my request for increased funding. Have you even read my latest report on epigenetic coding among introns?” Still standing, Mirelyis slapped down a bound document she had been carrying.
Lothar winced, his feelings hurt. How had he ever gotten into such a position, when all he wanted to do was string together novel base pairs resulting in useful long-chain molecules? Perhaps a little humor would alleviate the tense situation. “Dr. Sosa, that’s a baseless accusation—if you’ll forgive the pun. You know that I am extremely attentive to all the material from my staff, especially your findings. Your track record has been exemplary. Why, just your work on the diabetes project alone earned you a special status within the firm. But I simply cannot countenance devoting additional funds to this highly speculative quest of yours for meaning in ‘junk’ DNA. Everyone knows that introns are simply accumulated archaic genetic sludge, without any functionality. While I’m willing to indulge your theories at the current funding levels, as a sideline to your other projects, I cannot justify pouring extra funds down this particular rat hole.”
Lothar hoped he hadn’t been too forceful. But he had to put his foot down, or lose all credibility with his subordinates.
Mirelyis glared silently for several seconds at her boss then said, “Even uttering the phrase ‘everyone knows such and such to be true’ is the mark of a fossilized mind, Dr. Stixrude. I had expected much better of you. But your remarks are forcing me to reevaluate my position with Stixrude. While I do that over the next few days, I suggest you try looking at my research again, but this time with an open mind.”
And with that parting ultimatum, Mirelyis left.
What a horrible morning! Lothar felt as if he were being stretched through a pipette. What had he accomplished, except to please a fellow he disdained while alienating a woman he … admired. Oh, well, he could hardly undo what had been done. His only recourse, as always, was to lose himself in his lab. Levering himself painfully out of the chair, he made his way to his yeast-redolent sanctuary.
By the end of the long day, Lothar’s crippled body was so weary—although his mind continued to race—that he had to commandeer one of the company’s indoor Segways to travel from lab to front door. In the half-darkened atrium, he was surprised to see Celeste Foy still at her station. Lothar halted his Segway.
“Celeste, what are you doing here at this hour?”
“I don’t like to leave until you do, Dr. Stixrude. What if you needed something?”
Lothar didn’t know quite what to say. He had never really questioned such unremarked diligence and devotion on the part of his receptionist before. He had always assumed someone else had given her a task that demanded overtime.
“Uh, well, thank you, Celeste. I’m done for the night now. Let’s both get some rest.”
“See you first thing tomorrow, Dr. Stixrude.”
“Of course.”
Lothar’s car featured both hand-activated accelerator and brake controls to compensate for his disabilities and supplement the sophisticated autopilot functions. He was able to get home easily paying only half a mind to the traffic. The other half was busy with Jackmore’s new product idea. And on the seat beside him lay Mirelyis’s intron report.
By the time he pulled into the driveway of his modest Viridian house (built over a hot spring, with wind- and solar-power adjuncts), Lothar had become fully engaged with the notion of crafting EndoAgents that would catalyze tumescence with no more input than standard audiovisual and pheromonal excitatory triggers. The challenge of the task intrigued him. And the prospect of putting SEA on an even more solid financial footing was appealing as well. The more corporate liquidity, the more projects could be tackled.
As Lothar microwaved his straight-from-the-freezer supper, he made notes on his PDA about transferring his current project to another staffer.
Lothar had been working on the first canine EndoAgent, which would guard against heartworm. Currently, the pill that did that job had to be administered twice a year, or even monthly in some versions. An EndoAgent would be given once in the dog’s lifetime, then function ever after. (Jackmore had even already arranged with Eukanuba, the dog-food manufacturer, to include the
necessary leash-chemical exclusively in their brand of food, for a hefty licensing fee.) Lothar had conceived the project in memory of a pet he had owned as a child, a terrier named Springer. When Lothar succumbed to polio, his parents had returned to the States for his medical treatment, their missionary days ended. But their religious fervor had not abated sufficiently to include being mindful enough to take care of such precautionary measures as giving Springer his anti-heartworm drug, and the dog’s death had been so painful for Lothar that he had never dared have another creature under his care.
But the heartworm EndoAgent project was well advanced, and could safely be handed off.
Now that Lothar had firmly committed himself to a new course of research, he was left only with the problem of Mirelyis.
Retreating to the massage chair that was an essential station in his evening restoration ritual, Lothar carried Mirelyis’s report with him. As the humming, vibrating chair began to ease some of the kinks out of his twisted frame, Lothar commenced reading. Several pages into the report, he recalled previously giving up on the document at this point, and basing his decision on the abstract. Perhaps he had been hasty in his judgment.
Lothar continued to read until sleep overtook him where he sat.
What he experienced next was a lucid dream. Not quite as vivid or as deep as the epiphany that had allowed Kary Mullis to invent the polymerase chain reaction, Lothar’s dream nonetheless registered with some force.
He was roaming the stacks of an enormous library. Amazingly, he was not lame, but sound of body. He noted suddenly that the ranks of books on the library shelves were curiously divided into two types. A small number of the books had informative titles on their spines. But the vast majority of the books featured only blank spines. Yet when Lothar took down one of the blank-spined books and opened it, he discovered text inside that seemed, in the dream anyway, endlessly fascinating.
This dream seemed to occupy hours of exploration of the library, yet when Lothar awoke with a start he saw by his watch that he had been asleep for only twenty minutes. Still half in Morpheus’s realm, he managed to fumble through a shower and get to bed.
The next day Lothar summoned Dr. Mirelyis Sosa to his office first thing.
The beautiful Cuban biologist entered with a stern look on her face and an ultimatum trembling on her lips. But Lothar anticipated and stymied any complaints or demands.
“Dr. Sosa, I’ve doubled your request for additional funding and added three more people to your team. Additionally, I’ve relieved you of certain nonessential responsibilities. The only stipulation is that I want to discuss your findings with you on a daily basis. And I also hope not to hear any more silly talk about leaving Stixrude.”
The startled Spanish exclamation that emerged from Mirelyis’s mouth was the only time Lothar had ever heard her employ her native language in public. And he suspected that the expression she used was not one that she would have blurted out in any polite company that actually could have understood it.
Defeat had never before been a word in Lothar’s vocabulary.
But now, some two months after kicking off the Up! project, he painfully understood numerous subtle and humiliating shadings of that word.
Lothar had enjoyed many successes with his bacillomyces. But in retrospect, all his accomplishments had been quite simplistic. Each EndoAgent had been engineered to produce one or two significant proteins or enzymes or other metabolic factors that the patient had previously lacked, thus curing the disease or condition under attack. But this new project defied such easy strategies.
Male sexual arousal—vasocongestion of the penis—involved the autonomic and somatic nervous systems, the peripheral circulatory system, the spinal cord, the central nervous system, and the endocrine system. And that wasn’t even delving into the brain, where the hypothalamus and limbic system got to work, deluging the body with essential hormones such as oxytocin, FSH and LH. The whole intricate cascade needed to be as orderly as a ballet carried out atop a moving train. And somehow Lothar’s dumb EndoAgents were expected to orchestrate this complex knot of interlocking feedback loops in males whose baseline capabilities were deficient.
And make no mistake, the EndoAgents were dumb. This was not nanotech Lothar was working with, that perpetually receding Holy Grail of molecular manipulation. No, Lothar’s bugs were simply tricked-out gut flora which in their millions had about as much processing power as a fistful of earthworms.
Lothar could not simply create a bug which pumped out Viagra, Levitra, Bonerol, or one of the other performance enhancers, since these were proprietary formulations, jealously guarded by Stixrude’s competitors. And even if he could have licensed access to such a drug, there would still have remained the problem of having the bugs initiate the production based solely on subjective stimuli.
So unless Lothar could both tie in his bugs to the higher neuronal functions and increase their own brainpower, the Up! project looked doomed.
The first task was what he was concentrating on today. While it was not possible for EndoAgents actually to inhabit the brain—such an infestation was commonly called spinal meningitis—there were several ways of transmitting information between gray matter and the bugs. Reviewing the latest trials in mice, Lothar experienced a little hope that this particular aspect of the project could be achieved.
But as for the processing power—
Hopeless.
The day went by swiftly for the crook-backed scientist. His lunch arrived, thanks to the ministrations of Celeste Foy, who made sure Lothar received a hot meal each day from the company cafeteria. By late afternoon, the final item on his agenda was his daily meeting with Dr. Mirelyis Sosa.
Lothar had hoped, in the back of his mind, that by granting Mirelyis her wishes and supporting her research to the fullest, he would earn her gratitude and, perhaps, even a certain closeness. He knew nothing like romance could ever transpire between them. But even simple camaraderie had not been forthcoming. For over forty meetings, Mirelyis had maintained a completely businesslike, stoic, and dispassionate demeanor between herself and her boss. Nonetheless, Lothar continued to dream that each new day might bring a softening of her attitude.
Alas, today was not to be that day.
On the point of closing out her report, delivered in the most neutral tones possible, Mirelyis said, “And in conclusion, the results seem to indicate that introns have the capacity to function as two- way transcriptional units—”
Lothar felt a jolt go through him. “Transcriptional units? Do you think then that I could somehow make introns act like logic units for my bacillomyces? Treat them like registers or gates?”
For once Mirelyis seemed discomposed. Her neatly scribed eyebrows crept skyward. “Why, I don’t know. That seems far-fetched. We don’t really understand what role introns play in cellular mechanics. Interfering with them would—”
“Mirelyis, thank you so much. You’ve justified every penny you’ve spent! I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Right now I need to get into the lab.”
Mirelyis made to leave, obedient if somewhat bewildered. But before she could fully exit the office, Rand Jackmore arrived. Today the marketing man wore a D-squared suit fashioned from the newest processed seaweed fabric. He resembled a kelp-covered merman. Lothar experienced an instant flashback to that seminal day weeks ago when these two significant figures in his life had last intersected in his office.
“Why, it’s Dr. Sosa,” Jackmore smoothly oozed. “I thought for a moment that the Doc was getting a visit from Jennifer Lopez herself.”
Mirelyis’s haughty disdain would’ve frosted an autoclave. Lothar was secretly pleased to see that at least one person ranked lower in her esteem than he himself.
Once Mirelyis was gone, Jackmore turned to Lothar. “Doc, I need some good news on SEA’s Up! to feed the investors. What’ve you got?”
“Please, just Up!, if you recall our discussion.”
Lothar had been the first to realize that “SEA’s
Up!” sounded like the phrase “seize up,” not the most desirable connotation for a sexual booster.
“Oh, right, plain old Up! Well, what’s up with Up!?”
“If you had asked me half an hour ago, I would have said nothing. But I’ve just had an excellent inspiration that might solve all our technical impediments. You’d better dust off your ad campaign.”
“Great! I have this one spot in mind that features the Olsen Twins—”
“Wonderful, wonderful, now if you’ll please excuse me, I have important work to do—”
Lothar spent the entire night in his lab, all his customary aches and pains forgotten, as he furiously made great headway in conceptualizing the intron-baccilomyces connection, laying down nucleotide schematics and proteomic loops on his RiboCad.
When he finally Segwayed out to the Stixrude atrium at dawn, he encountered Celeste Foy asleep at her station, face down on her work surface. In addition to her plain looks, she apparently possessed a tendency to produce memorandum-rattling snores.
Lothar gently shook the receptionist awake.
“Celeste, you can go home now. My work on Up! is over for today.”
Celeste groggily replied, “Huh? Up is over? ’Zat mean down is under?”
Six months later, Lothar was nearly ready to begin human trials of Up!. The simian experiments had been most encouraging, if rather embarrassing to view in mixed company. And of course Dr. Sosa would have to insist on being present, since so much of Lothar’s success relied on her ground-breaking work with introns. (With Jackmore irremovably on hand as well, the uneasy atmosphere in the lab was similar to that of a middle-school assembly accidentally subjected to a pornographic video.) Using humanity’s vast stretches of unallocated archaic DNA as organic logic processors was a monumental leap in biotechnology. Already Lothar could foresee any number of new products flowing from this one technique.
Just a few more refinements to the instruction set guiding the EndoAgents, and the first human subject would scarf down a spoonful of pharmaceutical-grade yogurt loaded with Up!.
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