Accelerating Returns

by Peter Anthony

Chapter 3. Talbot Labs - 2016

   "Bobby, sometimes I suspect that you have a mistress," said Rachel.

  "You caught me," said Robert Lopez, dryly.  "It's been going on for twenty-five years."

  "As I suspected.  What's her name?"

  "Her name is the lab."  He said it with a half-hearted smile while leaning toward his wife for a parting kiss.

  Rachel smiled, "Love you.  Have a good day, Bobby."

  As soon as his wife could no longer see his face, Robert's forced smile rebounded into a dull expression.  Over his years of office and laboratory politics, Robert had mastered the facade of perpetual happiness, an essential career skill, facilitated by anti-depressants.  After taking the pills for four years, he wondered about their efficacy.  He envied his strict father, who seemed to cope with everything using a military adage when motivation was lacking.  The advice was simple: "Fake it until you make it."  Although many days Robert felt like he couldn't go one step further, he knew better than to allow emotions to interfere with his career and the real world.  The sadness, however, at this point in his career, made him fake every emotion, including love.  Passive and bored, he surrendered to anyone with an alternative to silence.  During this mid-life crisis, he became a mannequin of false levity, while inside he rotted under a compost of discarded emotions. 

  After the kiss goodbye, on his way to Talbot, Robert pulled into a McDonalds drive-thru and ordered two low-fat breakfasts.  His method of dealing with depression was by putting food and alcohol in his mouth.  On multiple occasions, he resolved to lose weight, but never resolved to forgo snacks during his commute.  At night he often stopped at a martini bar, where he stood out like a sore thumb.  

  The Illinois roads had only been partially thawed.  While driving, he listened to a radio pundit complain about China.  The popular radio personality raved about the event.  The incident jarred Americans, patriot or otherwise, and the pundit reminded the citizens to be skittish, angry, and fearful. 

  Robert laughed and turned the satellite radio to another show, one produced by Nature, the venerable science magazine.  Work distracted him from his sorrows, and although the level of his self-disgust fluctuated from day-to-day, week-to-week, hour-to-hour, he droned on dutifully.

  Depression didn't interfere with his career progress.  He worked on projects at Talbot Laboratories in Chicago, put out many scientific papers, and spearheaded research programs.  He continued volunteering, assisting, and mentoring the people in his lab, yet found little to no joy in what once was his source of undying fascination.  He was a biologist by education, re-christened as a nanotechnologist in 2009 when Talbot updated its corporate titles to stay en vogue with the science of job marketing. 

  The only impediment to his professional advancement came through his peer and fellow lab manager, Marshall Ploof, who seemed to consider Robert as nothing more than a pack mule and cash cow.  Whenever the time came for writing grants, or when the lab grew desperate for a paper to get published, Robert put in the extra hours and supplied the ideas.  When a new software application needed to be studied and put into production, Robert studied the manuals on the weekends and instructed others on how to use it.  Ploof was his peer, yet Robert felt exploited. 

  Since his undergraduate days at Baylor University, Robert had found in science his calling and escape.  Good discipline held his tongue in check, and his upbringing in a strong-handed family made him more of a diligent follower than a leader.  Robert remembered sore cheeks as the result of excess confidence.  However, bookish facts and data analysis served him well in the art of persuasion.  Because of his ability to think critically, the outspoken members of the lab like Marshall Ploof still needed to heed Robert.  He could poke a hole in any pie chart, topple a faulty graph, or decipher a blurry Western Blot.  When Robert felt that the current goals of the lab were misdirected, rather than confront Ploof, he simply negated the hypotheses with research and proofs, arguments of contradiction.  This quiet dissent, proof by negation, came off as subversive and passive-aggressive to Ploof, especially because Robert often harassed Ploof's pet projects.  The tension between them, although stressful, improved the quality of the lab.  Robert was the lab alchemist, a magical logician, and one of the primary workhorses that strained to build and maintain the great towers of Talbot Labs.

  Because of Robert's extraordinary attention to lab details, Marshall Ploof tended to focus his work on public relations.  A shameless self-promoter, he was short-listed to win a Nobel Prize, but Robert considered Ploof's findings to be somewhat plagiaristic from a Korean scientist.  Ploof and Lopez, so often at odds, stayed paired together at Talbot for many years, even through a disaster concerning a drug test that killed a Talbot research subject.  This death they shared. It solidified their lines of contention.  The failed experiment joined them into a frigid career marriage.

  The death occurred when Robert was forty-five years old.  By that time, his curriculum vitae included a PhD from DePaul, twelve patents, numerous papers, and exceptional respect in the industry.  He'd earned enough to retire, but science was his spiritual outlet, his contribution to the search for truth that philosophy and religion did not deliver for him.  He considered scientific discovery the highest art of modernity, the new religion.  For the first twenty years at Talbot he never questioned his research, but ever since the death, a chronic regret ate at his conscience as Talbot used his discoveries and life's work for indelicate uses.  The myth of altruism faded into relief behind a graying reality.

  In 2013, Robert Lopez observed and assisted in the lab experiment that altered his life view and ruined all that he held sacred.  The experiment involved a self-replicating molecule, one of the first, a free radical designed to combat a rare but mild strain of psoriasis.  Traditional drugs did not cure the disorder, so when a wealthy patient donated several million dollars to Talbot to find a cure for the mild disease, upper management contracted Robert Lopez and Marshall Ploof to use nanotechnology as a potential solution.  Talbot swallowed the windfall, and used it as an opportunity to get creative with some of its top scientists.  They designed a drug, and a series of clinical tests using mice proved successful.  Software models indicated that injecting the molecule into humans had a ninety-five percent probability of achieving the expected result.  Hence, the schedule went forward to test on voluntary human subjects, and Robert Lopez, confident from the software models, gave the thumbs up to the first volunteer, a research technician with psoriasis.  The research technician came to the trial-run with pride, knowing that he would to be the first recipient of a groundbreaking 'nano-drug.'  Upon delivery, the molecule repaired the psoriatic skin as expected, but the drug didn't stop at the skin.  The molecules were supposed to work for forty-five minutes before undergoing apoptosis, or self-death.  The molecules did cure the psoriatic condition, but they recognized other cells as targets for disassembly.  Bone cells, osteocytes, were attacked and broken down in the same manner.  From injection, it took thirty minutes of cell disassembly to kill the researcher.  The physician in charge of the trial attempted a massive blood transfusion on the patient, but the technician turned glass-eyed, and breathed his last. 

  In horror, Robert Lopez watched the procedure.  The results did not make sense. None of the models suggested even moderate risk. Before the trial, Robert had his best researcher, Isaac, check and double-check the software probability algorithms and results.

  Robert tried to resign from his job, but Talbot Laboratories effectively forced him to remain.  The company kept the story out of the public eye.  Never one to rock the boat, Robert did his duty to the company by signing a document that disallowed any further discussion about the incident.  To the families of the technician, Talbot offered them a tale about overexposure to anesthetic and the researcher's family settled out of court for a quiet heap of money.  At first, Robert only mourned the loss of his dedicated researcher, but eventually his belief in the aims
of science began to crumble.  Particularly his faith in numbers, and where he once saw only the brighter side of science, he now saw the randomness and chaos and harrowing endings.

  Nine months after the death of the technician, Robert attended an elite scientific convention in Las Vegas where a prominent geneticist made grave warnings about the direction of certain sciences.  The geneticist quoted Bill Joy, the great inventor from Sun Microsystems who outlined warnings about the coming transhuman science.  The crowd listened to the speaker only because of the geneticist's reputation, but some attendees could not scuttle their laughter.  The media called him a KillJoy and a neo-Luddite.  But Robert unconsciously nodded along with words coming from the podium.  The geneticist echoed Robert's thoughts.  After the convention, the geneticist became a pariah, had fifteen minutes of infamy, and donned the cover of Wired magazine as a cartoon dunce. He made negative headlines in major newspapers, but one month after his notorious speech, the stories migrated to page ten.  Within a year, the geneticist died peacefully in his sleep and was forgotten, almost unknown.  The news of the death stunned Robert Lopez because the man seemed the picture of health, broad-shouldered and lean.  When that voice of protest disappeared, Robert felt alone with his mounting doubts about his profession. 

  In the following years, Lopez continued to work for Talbot Laboratories against his better judgment.  His accomplishments and family life suffered due to long bouts of depression, and for awhile he refused to take anti-depressants, but to fight his wild thoughts he eventually agreed to a prescription.  He gained weight beyond the level that he could safely blame on his bone-structure, and by 2015, he weighed three hundred pounds.  His hygiene suffered and he became borderline diabetic.

   

  As Robert built a wall around himself, Marshall Ploof became more public in his endeavors and started laying claim to every breakthrough in the lab.  Throughout Robert's career, Marshall had been a scene stealer on several unwarranted occasions, but it was getting worse.  Ploof thrived during this period, from 2015 to 2016, taking full credit for Robert's work at conferences and meetings.  In his dejected state, Robert felt defeated and broken, a loser despite his winnings, pathetic despite his relevance.

   

  On the icy sidewalk leading up to the grand entrance of Talbot, Robert walked like a duck to keep his balance.  He passed underneath an enormous Talbot sign.  

  He mumbled his sarcastic daily affirmation, quoting Dante. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

  He swiped his authentication badge in the door and took an elevator to his office.  The guards and receptionists at the front desk offered cheery hellos.  At work he kept up a solid front for everyone he came into contact with, in order to avoid appearing too timid or cowardly.  Like an addict, he spent more time acting than simply being.

  Once inside his office, he immediately locked the door behind him.  He left his jacket on and slumped into his chair.  Thinking nothing, desiring an intangible something, for a few minutes he rubbed his forehead and stared out the window at the snowy landscape beyond the Talbot facility.  But soon his gnawing work-ethic spurned him into action, slowly and surely, goading him into another full twelve hour day, starting with reading through forty emails and replying to half of them.  The morning email flush itself took nearly three hours of his day, and following that, he had to read and respond to the lab collaboration forum, where his name was flagged to follow-up on ten different threaded discussions.  The administrative tasks, necessary to his understudies' research, consumed most of the morning.  The afternoon consisted of meetings and one-on-one conversations with researchers and technicians, leaving only the late afternoon hours to work on his personal projects.  Still, he never complained.  Instead he bore the duress of his chosen lifestyle, like a silent martyr of hours, curiously content to be without any kind of pleasure.

  Halfway through reading his emails, he came across one from Marshall Ploof reminding all lab members to attend the Christmas party that Friday evening.  Robert groaned, imagining himself incredibly bored and frustrated with having to go over the same conversations that went on at every Christmas party, ones with family members of grad students and post-docs, who always wanted to hear Robert tell a fascinating piece of dumbed-down science.  He assumed they listened only for ideas on stock investments.  The party ended up as an exercise in portfolio sniffing, no different than the interactions of a dog park.   

  Thus, his day in the office and the lab carried forth with the same malaise, until eight o'clock in the evening when he gathered his handbag and started his car in the parking lot with his remote key.  But instead of going home, he detoured to the martini bar, had two vodkas, and sat all alone staring at a plasma TV while poseurs of high society pranced around him in suits and skirts.  His disheveled appearance and weight hardly suited the bar's regular clientele.  Robert weathered the perceived snickering that went on at his expense, and he ogled the slender, loud-laughing women from his corner of the bar, knowing that his chance of having anything beautiful happen outside of the science world was as dead as cold fusion.  Sex didn't even interest him anymore. His libido mirrored his attitude. 

  He arrived at home at ten o'clock and crawled into bed with Rachel.  He kissed her on the cheek and stared at the ceiling.  His mind wandered through a well-traveled path of self-critical stepping stones.  In the quiet of his bedroom he arrived at the same conclusions that led him to abhor his occupation.  His thoughts hammered on an isolated conscience until he drowned in an exhausted sleep that seemed to end as soon as it began.

   

  Friday morning, the alarm sounded, causing Robert to immediately turn his feet over the side of the bed and begin his daily routine.  Rachel slept for an additional hour while Robert prepared for work.  She offered unbounded support and love for Robert in all of his efforts, which he had come to take for granted over the years.  Caught up in work and depression, he hardly acknowledged her cheerfulness that once brought so much joy to the relationship.  Before he left that morning, she packed his lunch and saw him out the door, like she did every day. 

  "Don't eat too much today, Bobby.  We have the Christmas party tonight."

  "Damn," he thought, and then smiled.  "I won't, dear."

  "Have a good day of work."

  "See you tonight."  They leaned toward each other for a parting kiss.

   

  At the office, Robert went past the guard with his usual greeting and walked to his office.  Before he put his key into the lock on his office door, down the hall he heard a woman's voice say "Congratulations."  He paused to eavesdrop on the conversation, and quickly realized that Marshall Ploof was the recipient of the praise. 

  Ploof said to the woman, "Oh, thank you, Dr. Gwinn."

  Dr. Gwinn said, "You scooped Japan!"

  "Well, we are just happy to have published it so quickly.  But don't congratulate me - it's the people in my lab that really did the work on S24."

  "Oh, don't be so modest.  Everybody knows your lab is superb, and congratulations go to the top.  I'm going to announce the findings to my staff today.  This is a very big deal.  I'd like to meet with you and go over the details behind the design."

  Robert's jaw fell open upon hearing 'S24,' a code name for a novel post-transcriptional gene silencing technique.  His cheeks flushed with the blood of disbelief.  He checked an urge to race down the hallway to unleash a tirade on Ploof for his audacity.  The S24 research had been Robert's focus for nearly two months, and Ploof's contributions were negligible.  Swearing under his breath, Robert unlocked his office door and walked inside.  He sat down at his computer with a sullen face and opened his email, quickly scanning the subject lines for something on the S24 paper.  There in middle of his email was the message that made Robert's blood boil.  Ploof and a few of his loyal underlings had worked on a paper behind Robert's back, even while Robert assisted the backstabbers with every facet of the study
.  His eyes poured over the email three times, and his head grew hot.  Ploof had gone too far.  But instead confronting Ploof right away, he stewed in anger for an hour, with his head in his hands.  In his haste to read the email, he forgot to shut and lock his door behind him, and the open door indicated to passers-by that he was available for discussion. 

  One of the research technicians popped his head into the door and said, "Good news on a Friday for once, huh?"

  Robert glared at his computer monitor before turning with a smile to the technician.  "You said it."

  The technician said, "We sure got S24 published fast.  I didn't even know that paper was ready to go out."

  Robert said, "Things happen fast around here, I guess."

  "We couldn't have done it without you. Have a good day, Dr. Lopez."

  As soon as the technician left the doorway, Robert quietly closed the door and locked himself inside.  For the rest of the morning, his mind went over different alternatives to deal with the situation.  The rancor set deep in his stomach.  At noon, a pair of knuckles rapped loudly on his door.  He drew a deep breath and unlocked the door.

  Marshall Ploof stood in the doorway wearing a wide grin.

  "Good morning Robert.  Just wanted to stop by and thank you for your contributions to the paper."

  Robert nodded and said, "It's a big accomplishment."

  "To say the least.  I hope you don't mind, I encouraged Saul, Isaac, and Cheryl to write a paper, and they did a very good job putting together an excellent draft in a short time.  It was imperative that we get the results out first, before anyone else did."

  "Yes, to be first," Robert said, inflecting negatively, "but S24 needs more testing.  Sure we have results, but there are ramifications to this that we've not gone over yet.  The results could be a lot more concrete..."

  Ploof waved off Robert's concern, saying, "This could have gone out a month earlier.  And sorry to say, Robert, I had them work on the paper without telling you because I knew you'd be opposed.  But time is of the essence.  This will guarantee a bigger budget for next year."

  "This is haste, Marshall."  He pushed his hands through his uneven hair.  "And it's short-term thinking."

  "Well, your long-term thinking would keep us a year behind Kyoto and Boston, not to mention Singapore.  We needed a breakthrough, and this is one that required a little haste, if that's what you prefer to call it.  I call it progress, Robert."

  Quickly becoming docile, Robert's arguments failed him, and all that he could muster in rebuttal was a weak, "Haste makes waste." 

   "Oh, and an ounce of prevention?  Should we discuss this in proverbs?" 

  Robert shook his head in disgust and turned away from Ploof's eyes.

  Ploof spoke to Robert's back.  "You know, your pessimism about this will only divide lab morale.  I don't mean to be rude, Robert, but this is an optimistic period of time, and you need to see it for what it is."

  "It's practically dry-labbing."  He mumbled and turned around.  "The data was not ready for publication."

  "Well, the research continues, and we'll produce the data."

  "That's an assumption. Ethics, Ploof."  Referring to the CEO, Robert added, "Mr. Jovan agrees with me.  He doesn't admire rushed results."

  "You know Robert, I really admire you and Mr. Jovan for being so ethical, but with your way, we'd be the last to publish anything."

  "And with your mania for fame, we have questionable science that takes years to correct if its wrong.  It's like turning around a supertanker. I should mention this to Marcus Jovan."

  Ploof called Robert's bluff.  "Well, he'll be at the party on Friday.  Take it up with him then."  Ploof said nothing further, but sighed and walked away from Robert's office door.